The U School explored creating alternative pathways for high school seniors, and in 2019 made a commitment to considering how to bring some sort of agriculture CTE program to the U School. Over the course of many months, the first one-year CTE program in the state (country?) was outlined and then approved and then staffed. Read more
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
The Earthseed Outdoor Learning Lab project, one of Saul’s initiatives in the EFS program, is inspired by Octavia E. Butler’s novel, Parable of the Sower specifically, the text’s concept of “Earthseed.” This spiritual belief system that centers on truth, knowledge, adaptatbiltiy, growth, nature, & community was used as the core value system to imagine the lab. 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