By Rachel Adams
In my years as an 8th Grade Math teacher, I often came face to face with infamous student sayings like, “When am I ever going to use this?” or “I’m not a Math person.” Showing students why Math mattered and challenging their assumptions about how Math showed up in their world, meant opening the walls of my classroom and that was daunting. Not only did I need to teach the curriculum, but I also needed to demonstrate why it was meaningful. Sharing relevance for my students meant going beyond word problems and bringing authentic and real challenges into my class, questions that I might not have the answers to myself.
When I decided to leave the classroom, I wanted to keep exploring answers to the questions my students asked me. I wanted to help students, teachers, and communities flourish. Finding the Program Manager position at WPS Institute felt like the best way for me to do that. At WPS, we believe that each community has the potential to be an education ecosystem, a unique network of people, organizations, spaces and resources that can be leveraged for learning.
In 2022, WPS joined forces with Salem Public Schools (SPS) in Salem, MA, to reimagine the middle school learning experience. This means forming relationships with various community partners and institutions to build authentic learning experiences. We know that when we connect students to what is happening in their neighborhoods and local communities, they are engaged and empowered to see the potential for learning everywhere.
Class on the River
This past school year, I began meeting with Salem’s Collins Middle School and the Ipswich River Watershed Association (IRWA) to help coordinate a second year of community partnership. Emma Hughen, the Environmental Educator at IRWA, Elena Rodriguez-DePaul, the Innovation Manager at Collins Middle School, and I formed the design team. We went through hours of planning and logistics, thinking about ways that we could give students multiple touch points with IRWA, the Ipswich river, and the town of Ipswich.
Elena and I had agreed that building a design challenge into our Ipswich River programming would support students in understanding how design thinking allows people to solve complex problems. Elena and I thought that teaching students about alternative eco-friendly dam building methods would be a useful and clear way to tie in the Science and Engineering curriculum to the work we were doing with the Ipswich River. We sat down with Emma to talk this through:
“Can you describe for me, what kind of dam you would want to see built on the Ipswich river?”
“Well, we actually wouldn’t want to build any type of dam on the river.”
This moment stopped me in my tracks. In my efforts to help build a school-community design partnership, had I totally missed the mark?
Until this conversation, two weeks before we kicked off our student facing program, we had never discussed the alignment of our student learning objective with IRWA’s mission and goals.
Emma shared how as an advocacy organization, IRWA didn’t support any type of dams being built on the river; in fact they were in the midst of a local advocacy campaign for dam removal.
After this revelation, I asked Emma, “What would you say are the biggest challenges the Ipswich River is facing?” And they immediately responded: “Runoff pollution, Water Usage, and River Connectivity.”
A fresh approach to partnership
In this moment, it clicked for us that not only were our students being charged with learning about the authentic needs of our community partner, so were Elena and I. When schools think about designing solutions and responding to community challenges, it is important to understand our partner's priorities. Our goal is for school-community partnerships to be truly reciprocal. We want to be designing with our partners, not for them. It is in this way that our design solutions are not insufficient to the often complex situations they propose to address.
Over the following month, we leveraged our relationship with IRWA to provide students with highly local context and resources to learn about the real challenges the river is facing and propose feasible solutions to IRWA leadership. Students conducted expert interviews, visited the Ipswich Museum and Mill dam, and gathered feedback on their initial prototypes from Emma directly. They also worked alongside Emma on site to run experiments assessing the health and vitality of the river.
Students’ final design proposals ranged from social media campaigns on water conservation and river connectivity, to low flush “disco” toilets. Students dreamed up new and improved fish ladders, they created low water usage rewards programs, and planned community groups to monitor road salt runoff. Emma reflected,
“It's always a win when we get to share what we actually do for work with students. And I think we did that this year more so than last year... they really did get to do a macroinvertebrate count, and they really did do dissolved oxygen testing... So from an organizational perspective, that was a big win for us, getting to share that.”
When we asked our students to provide feedback on their favorite parts of our partnership, students ranked these science experiments highly. One said, “This was my favorite part because I got to learn more about the species in the Ipswich river. I also got to learn how they filter the water to make it more clearer and take out all the dirt and bad bacteria.”
This partnership increased students’ understanding of challenges facing the river and helped students see themselves as scientists and citizens. As a design team, we are already beginning to iterate for next year. We are gathering information to see what new needs and challenges our community partners at IRWA are facing so that together we can design new solutions. I am personally waiting with baited breath to return to the river bank.
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The WPS Institute creates innovative programs and partnerships to transform learning. We advance models of schooling where learning thrives everywhere, in classrooms and beyond; where students and their families are empowered to shape their own educational journeys; and where entire communities contribute to the development of young people.
Author
Rachel Adams WPS, Program Manager
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