The RWL Podcast has a purpose: to share stories of learning in the Upper Canada District School Board as told by the teachers and students leading them. Our conversations focus on projects that have happened. It’s often the ultimate reflective exercise: sit behind a microphone and tell the story. The shortcoming of this is that we often miss how projects continue beyond the school calendar; how students pass the project on to their peers. How teachers develop ideas with students that carry on and evolve in the teaching and learning relationship.

As a pedagogy, real-world learning has a curious spinoff – in practice, once in place, real-world learning is an enduring approach to teaching and learning. There is an infectious quality to the approach for students, teachers, schools and communities that outlasts the school calendar. Projects feed new projects; school calendars need to be played with because the work doesn’t end. Students choose to work on the projects during recess, after school, during summer vacation. The work feels like something else, because the impact of the work is so profound. The contribution student learning makes in the communities our schools live within means that a symbiotic relationship grows out of students making a difference – for all stakeholders. Schools become a hub of change, and are seen as a catalyst to continue change. UCDSB students are engendering improvements in their communities such that communities are asking for more learning to make further improvements. As one Secondary student commented, “I don’t like school, but I like helping people.”

This brings us to Chesterville Public School in Storment, Dundas, Glengarry Counties where students in Robyn Carriere’s 4/5, now 5/6 French Immersion class - have been learning about food insecurity and becoming solutionaries in their own backyards. What is unique about this conversation is that it is about the continuity of a project rather than showcasing a finished project. We are entering the conversation in a state of evolution and extension rather than conclusion. We hear about where things began, where they went, and where the initial project is reaching in the context of one school in the UCDSB.

Students in Robyn’s class look beyond the walls of their school, into their community, and they see need – tangible needs like access to healthy food, and equally important if intangible needs like well-being. 10- and 11-year-olds are making the connection between wellness and well-being seamlessly in a way that adults seemingly struggle to understand. When the students learned about the notion of core needs with community partner Christine Cross- Barkley from Faith Garden in Chesterville all bets were off. With emerging French language skills on display, the students spent the year learning French as a means to helping others.

It may just be the case that students are on to something here: school without contribution to community lacks direction. Learning that builds people while helping people involves an agency which forges the public education system into “the foundation of a prosperous, caring and civil society.”