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.