Democratizing School

“This gift has allowed me to make meaningful and rich connections with a plethora of individuals and organizations both near and far. At the same time, it has provided me with the right balance of time and space to both collect and ponder so much about how to improve the quality of education at my school.”

The “democratization of school” will give students more opportunities to develop and use the skills, knowledge, and dispositions that are integral to a vibrant and active democracy. Harwood Union High School wants to integrate rigor, relevance, and relationship for the lives of their students and as a result increase student engagement.

This project focuses broadly on student voice and the role of ethnography in learning. More specifically it seeks to include many best practices that will ultimately increase opportunities for student voice in their schools and greater communities. For example, future curriculum will be developed collaboratively between teachers, students and community. Students will participate in the responsibilities of auditing, researching, and assessing needs for school reform. Finally, students will strive to understand themselves relative to the various communities they interact with both virtually and for real. In doing so they will become stronger democratic citizens that will not only seek to improve the world around them for themselves, but also for others around them.

The democratization of our school is the foundational principle upon which transformation has been built at Harwood Union High School. Our H-1 Change Proposal Process – empowers all stakeholders to initiate potential change. A team of students and faculty will showcase our collaborative, ongoing transformation work to include an H-term, a two-week block of instructional time devoted to student choice and student voice; student-run assemblies; a Big Picture Model school-within-a-school; transforming our food service by working with community partners; Youth and Adults Transforming Schools Together team (YATST) using an action-research model to guide transformation; and a performance-based graduation portfolio meant to measure how our community is meeting the goals of our mission statement.