Adding Sustainability Standards & All School Sustainability Initiative to Curriculum

The U School is based on a competency model.

We have subject specific competencies, and more global ones, with performance indicators like 

“I can monitor my progress, set and track my goals, and create a post-secondary plan to ensure that I am college and career ready.”

There are a set of relevant, but inadequate Next Generation Essentials competencies, that we are currently working to make more robust, in the interest of Target 4.7 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) education for sustainable development and global citizenship. Read more

Toolkit for Teachers- how/why do I teach outside of my content area and comfort zone?

One of the things that the AFNR program offers is an abundance of “real world” problems that are not contrived. Teachers need look no further than the schoolyard (or even their own classroom) to see all the different ways that students can be engaging in their particular content area as it relates to food access and the relationship between nature and the built environment.  Read more

Guerilla Gardening

Students became interested in the concept of guerrilla gardening after doing a different unit involving guerrilla style sticker campaigning around issues that they cared about. Something about doing something that you’re technically not really supposed to do speaks to a certain part of the teenage soul. 10th grade students worked with Anna Herman and the AFNR seniors to learn how to make pollinator seed balls. Read more

Trip to Iglesias Gardens and Phone Zap

10th grade students went on a trip to Iglesias Gardens to learn more about how gentrification and development is impacting the community land reclamation movement in Philadelphia. Mr. Anthony from the gardens talked to students about the complex legal nightmare that entraps a lot of land stewards and the systems that contribute to their land being taken away. Read more

Complex Relationships with Land Explorations

We had discussions about how, while growing things and connecting with nature should be a happy and positive experience, because of this country’s violence against people and the earth, those relationships can actually be very traumatic.

We looked at different groups of people’s historically traumatic relationships with land. We included US mainland indigenous people, native Hawaiians, descendants of enslaved Africans, Puerto Rican people, poor white mine/extraction workers, and Black Philadelphians. Read more

Introducing the U School’s ideas, Competencies, and Chaos

The U School was founded with a mission to break down the “top down” approach of education, and instead center students, granting them autonomy and agency that is not what one would find at a “traditional high school.” This of course presents challenges for staff and students! The educators that come to the U School typically know what they’re getting themselves into, though, while students have frequently expressed feelings of being “duped” by the older students who came and spoke to them about what they liked about the school.  Read more

My Experience at the U School

As I concluded my time at the U School, we were setting students up for summer internships in sustainability fields and to sign up for Anna’s summer program where students would be learning about sustainability and fulfilling different tasks in community gardens and around the school. I was also helping students to finish their senior projects where they chose a proposal or a research topic to present to their classmates. Read more

Focusing in at The U School

A challenge we have been facing at the U School is getting kids from all grade levels involved in sustainability action and awareness in their community. Because Anna teaches a senior level class, it has been easy to heavily involve the seniors with background building, community partners, and hearing their opinions on sustainability at the school. Read more