Extending the Vision in Regina, Saskatchewan

The Fielding Nair International design team returned to the beautiful city of Regina, in Saskatchewan, Canada to continue working with the Steering Committee there to assist in the re-design of the community of North Central.  This video documents our meeting in April, '08 that continues to refine the vision for the project.  Take a look...

As part of the design team focused on the educational aspects of the North Central project, we here at Guerilla Educators address the incredible opportunities that the re-design will have on the neighborhood by an exercise in imagining.  The list below, in no particular order, is a synthesis  of outcomes developed after listening to and working with the North Central Shared Facility Steering Committee.

Imagine…

•    Imagine teaching and learning spaces that connect directly and authentically to the community. 
•    Where students learn by addressing real-world issues that are important to them in a variety of ways. 
•    Where they have ownership in their educational processes. 
•    Where they are engaged, invested, and interested in what and how they learn. 
•    Where they achieve mastery of grade appropriate curricular objectives across a variety of disciplines. 
•    Where daily attendance and participation at their Personalized Learning Communities becomes a vital part of the student’s day (rather than the opposite being true). 
•    Where their Service Learning projects allow them to see citizenship/leadership modeled from their world-class Community Partners.
•    Where development of good citizenship skills is part of the fabric of teaching and learning and becomes critical to the long term, real-life success of our students. 
•    Where these civic skills enhance and give greater depth, context and meaning to student mastery of curriculum and standards. 
•    Where students who are working cooperatively to successfully realize the goals of a project are more inclined to negotiate with their peers and make persuasive arguments to get their point of view adopted by the group.
•     Where the cooperative nature of small groups working together for successful completion of the project has an extremely positive effect on the classroom climate and where behavior issues are significantly mitigated. 
•    Where students are motivated to succeed. 
•    Where critical thinking, hypothesis, trial and error, and extension of learning become commonplace pedagogical strategies.
•    Where teaching and learning happens in a safe, nurturing environment in the midst of a vital, active community.
•    Where law enforcement is perceived as a vital community asset and students are mentored by police officers.
•    Where the rich diversity of cultures, including First Nations, Meti, and European are mutually respected and cooperatively enhance, reinforce, and inform teaching, learning, and citizenship development in our students.
•    Where all of the Community Partners in the Shared Facility work together for the greater good and improvement in the quality of life of North Central.
•    Where technology (the no.2 pencil of the 21st century) is suffused throughout all teaching and learning initiatives.
•    Where ALL learners are expected to demonstrate proficiency at rigorous levels of literacy and numeracy –no excuses- and teachers have the resources and professional training to guide them in achieving mastery of those skills.
•    Where Business, Industry, and Government sectors actively seek out our graduates for leadership positions based on their Project Based Service Learning experiences in high school.

Now it's your turn!

Just imagine...

Comments

[John Otterstedt]

Great post! The list inspired me to break from what I was doing to do some planning for next week.

My new blog covers some similar issues as your blog, and I was pretty surprised to see how few people are talking about this stuff. My guess is that the increased focus on testing is making people hyper focus on distinct subject areas and testing skills, which is sad. Once a school dives head-first into these types of projects and sees the "real" learning that is taking place, they would never go back. And their test scores would go up too!