In this episode of the Real-World Learning podcast, the first of our ROOTS series, we talk to former Chair of the board Jeff McMillan and Principal Rich Tamblyn about their time as educators in the UCDSB and how they developed an approach to learning that they called the Current Experience Program. When you read about and watch video of the experience they helped promote in their classrooms, you see first-hand the connection between the school world and the real world. Students are in the field asking questions as they arise and proposing approaches to seek answers. It is what science, math, social science, and history look like when scientists, mathematicians, social scientists, and historians do them. It is how disciplines show up in the real world. Which begs the question: why would we learn them any differently than how they came to be subjects in the 1st place? Real-World Learning in the UCDSB is a pedagogical evolution that seeks to bring an approach to learning that Jeff and Rich were experimenting with 20 years ago to all our classrooms. In this episode of the Real-World Learning Podcast, Jeff, Rich, and previous students help us see the long-term impacts on teaching and learning of the current experience in the UCDSB.

As the saying goes, it takes all kinds of different people to make the world go round. Or, at least, it helps.

We make our unique imprints on the earth – footsteps maybe – that only we can make. Without our feet those footsteps would simply never walk the earth.

Ideally, our children, over 14 years of schooling in public education will encounter all kinds of different ways of knowing, and doing, and being in the world. As they do, they weave their own personality into an entity that couldn’t have become without all the other threads encountered in the formation.

This brings me to Adam Cross, from Lyn Public School, in Lyn, Ontario. As you’ll hear, Adam likes to leave the doing and being to the students, offering some insightful knowing in moments where it makes sense. Otherwise, he’d be hard pressed to articulate the powerful learning that he facilitated in his classroom throughout the 2023 school year.

One reason for this is his belief in the capacity of children, the capacity of his students. Adam is hardly surprised that his students managed to navigate the real world with such grace. It has always been the case, and it will continue, as always. Adam walks the earth with calmness in search of meaning.

So, when students at Lyn Public School expressed concern for the environment, and an eagerness to educate the community to preserve and protect the earth, Adam sought out partnerships with the likes of Kelly McGann, The Cataraqui Trail, Frontenac Arch Biosphere Reserve and the Lyn Valley Conservation Area. His students began developing a story walk trail with their own stories sharing learnings and teachings. The stories morphed into mobile installations that can be moved to create story trails in conservation areas all over the region.

A year later, the projects are continuing and expanding; and students who have since moved on to Secondary schools in the UCDSB are regularly asking what’s happening, where are the stories going next.

Adam wouldn’t put too much attention on all this learning. Fortunately, we have a podcast for that.

In education, and beyond, we hear it all too often. It’s a disdain for youth. How this generation of young people is failing – at the essentials, at life, in school. It is a comment of frustration and apathy and disregard. Kids today.

If you work in our schools you witness a different reality. In social media vernacular, despite the challenges of being young and growing up, the kids are alright.

In the case of students from Vankleek Hill Collegiate Institute in Vankleek Hill, Ontario, alright doesn’t do justice for how the kids are doing.

Following their remarkably humble educator, Turner Onion, students at VCI helped to reimagine what a business course might do in the act of learning. The learning focused on a problem and how business-sense, and entrepreneurial spirit could address it: if students designed a learning commons with their needs in mind, what would the design be? The project began there. How to move a design from paper to reality, well that took all the real-world learning acumen you can imagine.

In the summer of 2023, as things were winding down in Ontario schools, students, staff, and the community were putting the finishing touches on a year-long project that brought a school together. Turner would tell you that the success belongs to the students. He’s right, it does.

What he might forget to tell you is that his leadership, vision, and willingness to make room for learning and follow the students was the catalyst and, ultimately, the path to success.

Erika Christakis, the author of the bestselling book The Importance of Being Little argues that when it comes to children and learning, adults have “a profound lack of faith in what young children are capable of.”  

Christakis also points out that “children are wired with the capacity for learning.”  

Let’s start with capacity, then: the depths to which an individual can reach into their superpowers when faced with a challenge to employ them.   

In the UCDSB’s Power Up Program, we work to discover children's superpowers as a means to thriving in school. Alexander Den Heijer’s  words guide us: “When a flower doesn’t bloom you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.”  

If you ask Mariah Gallacher she’ll tell you all the stories of the children from her Power Up classroom at Commonwealth PS in Brockville, ON. She’ll tell you where things began. She’ll tell you how the concern of one child became the project of many children. She’ll tell you about the children who found their voices while learning to teach. She’ll tell you - with total humility - how she came to be the documentarian of the journey of a group of children towards learning no one expected – not even her, not even the children entrusted to her care. Where there was hope, eventually the stories came to life. The flowers bloomed.  

In the UCDSB we sometimes remark on hope as data. We view this x-factor, this invisible driver, as essential to student success. Why? It’s back to this idea of capacity.  

When it comes to real-world learning, and children, it turns out that there is a limitless capacity to tap into when the purpose of the learning is tethered to meaningful work that reaches beyond the walls of school.  

Even more so the case for students whose promise is atrophying in the moment. Fix the environment, not the flower. 

In this episode of The Real-World Learning Podcast we discover that an ordinary concern of an observant child can lead to extraordinary things.  

Can you see it? No, no, over there. Look closely, can you see it now?  

It’s a classroom.  

Well, yes, you’re right it’s ALSO a trail, a nature reserve, a land trust, a provincial park. No doubt this classroom is also those things too. First and foremost, it’s a classroom.  

And the best part is this classroom doesn’t need anything else to become a learning experience. It’s an all-inclusive optimal learning space primed for learning adventures.  

When students at Pakenham PS arrived at High Lonesome Nature Reserve they were naturally filled with questions. Just as it has for millennia, nature sparked an unquelled thirst for wonder in the students who found themselves surrounded by it one day in the Fall of 2022.  

What followed was the magic of real-world learning: begin outside the walls of school, begin with fascinations that unveil themselves as students wonder, and the learning takes care of itself – or at least the adventure does. All of the sudden the curriculum, contextualized, holds purpose. If I am full of questions, and you can help me grow into new ideas, you’re the kind of teacher I am looking for. And the amazing thing is, our communities are full of teachers, they are everywhere. 

When Jaime Hewitt began the adventure, she began with the same first steps as her students. The hike that followed was a career altering experience. In this episode, the first of our second season, you’ll hear what real-world learning looks like in the classroom that is our planet.  

Now can you see it? If you’re looking out a window you can see just what I mean. Nature is an edifice unto itself. It just needs you, calls your students, to know it more intimately. Into the wild we go.  

What if every class began with the provocation, “What if our class could help even just one person?”  

What if the response to this possibility began a year-long learning adventure that helped people?  

What if the curriculum was contextualized to serve the help a community needs, as a toolbox, and students saw their labour, their learning, as contributing to a better community? One, maybe, in their own vision. Maybe, one, from their dreams.  

In all the discussion about engagement there is a glaring piece missing from the conversation: students, like all of us, seek purpose in their lives and their learning. Beginning with challenges that students want to participate in solving – beginning with meaning - serves a dual purpose: first, students see themselves as agents in transforming the society in which they live; second, in the act of transforming society, one can’t help but be changed, and transformed, themselves.  

Grade 5 & 6 students at Pleasant Corners Public School in Vankleek Hill, Ontario, learned with these big ideas in mind for the entirety of the 22/23 school year. In the process they raised thousands of dollars, improving their community, near and far, with energy and drive, and as the learning in their classroom.  

On June 15th, the students launched 10 entrepreneurial concepts at their year-end BBQ. The school became a carnival of creativity and original ideas, full of the community seeing the students, remarking on their superpowers. The students in turn saw themselves as agents in their community, and the world beyond school. The students raised over $4000 in less than two-hours. Who did they help? How did they help? That’s what this episode of The Real-World Learning Podcast is about.    

This is a story about theatre. This is a story about community-connected theatre. This is a story about Young Company, an old idea reimagined 30 years later, for now.  

In Part 1, of our conversation you heard students from Gananoque Secondary School talk about all the work, all the learning, that goes into, went into, the production of Miss Electricity.  

In Part 2, we talk to the artists from Thousand Islands Playhouse, and the teacher, Robyn Ableson from Gananoque Secondary School, who fulfilled the meta-production role of Young Company.  

Above all else, the vision, the hope to, for this iteration of Young Company was to bring young people to the theatre who never imagined finding a place there: who never imagined themselves on the stage, and so could never imagine a place in theatre that included them.  

How do we find ourselves when we can’t imagine it? How do we see ourselves in the future with only incomplete awareness of what is possible?  

Young Company is project, a collaboration between the Upper Canada District School Board and Thousand Islands Playhouse that seeks to help children see all the ways that they can be involved in theatre as a way for them to imagine all the ways they can be in the world.  

In the real world there are dozens of disciplines that serve every project, but we often only see the face of these projects, missing the multitudes that made the stage for those that represent the project.  

In this episode of the Real-World Learning Podcast, we meet the artists who helped students in Young Company see themselves anew.  

"All the world’s a stage, 

And all the men and women merely players; 

They have their exits and their entrances; 

And one man in his time plays many parts."

Many parts, you say. There’s the rub: what we don’t see,  we don’t understand. Our awareness is incomplete.  What remains behind the scenes, remains invisible.  

The theatre is a perfect metaphor for life: the stage and its players obscure the production, the many parts that create the world that both the players and the stage can’t exist without.  

Enter The Young Company: a collaboration between the Thousand Islands Playhouse and Gananoque Secondary School.  

Scene: a hidden gem on the St. Lawrence Seaway, Gananoque, Ontario.   

Young people congregate at a production facility to stage a play: throughout the 4 month process students design and make costumes, props, design and build the stage, bring the stage to life with scenic painting, design and light the production, design and execute sound, and, of course, coordinate the stage full of actors in a production of Miss Electricity the likes of which the world has never truly seen.  

When the play opens, it opens to a full-house at the Firehall Theatre, a short jaunt from the seaway , opening the 2023 summer season.  

The parts we play, one might say, brought to life, into the light: the back of house to the spotlight, to share in the applause and magic of theatre. To see the theatre as if for the first time.  

A special thanks to Kieran Velcov for sharing his original composition which you heard at the beginning of the episode; this piece of music became the musical thread for Young Company’s production of Miss Electricity which ran at Thousand Island Playhouse during the month of May, 2023.