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About the Grove

About the School

1. Mission

The Grove Community School supports the diverse developmental and educational needs of students in a learning environment emphasizing environmentalism, social justice, and community activism.

2. Current Status

Our 2009-2010 school year was comprised of four classes: a morning and afternoon JK/SK, a Grade 1 class and a Grade 2/3 class. In 2010, we will be accepting a full JK class for students born in 2006 as well as a limited number of students from SK through Grade 4.

3. Objectives

  • An open and collaborative school community where students, parents, teachers, and interested community members share decision-making to determine the school's guiding values and principles.
  • An environment that challenges competitive individualism and fosters sustainable, community-centered ways of teaching, learning, and knowing.
  • An experiential, 'lived curriculum' connecting classroom learning to community involvement.
  • To share ideas and information with other TDSB schools in the areas of school governance, curriculum, and teacher development to promote mutual learning and benefits.

4. Values

  • Environmentalism/Ecological Literacy
  • Equity, Diversity, and Social Justice
  • Community Engagement and Activism
  • Peace Making and Cooperative Learning
  • Arts-Infusion
  • Educational Excellence
  • Collaborative Assessment of Student Learning
  • Parental and Student Involvement in Decision-making

5. Educational Philosophy

While The Grove Community School satisfies Ontario Ministry of Education requirements with respect to curriculum expectations, it also goes beyond them and is guided by and infused with our School's mission, objectives, and values.

The curriculum is designed to tap into and further stimulate children's curiosity, imagination, creativity, love of learning, and sense of personal, social, and ecological responsibility. The School strives to be an engaging place for children where they benefit from many opportunities to help direct their learning and shape their learning environments. For example, if students were especially interested in honey bees, they could choose that as a topic to explore through science, poetry, music, dance, art, architecture, math, creative writing, and natural history.

Our school challenges traditional assumptions about education and reflects critically on its own practices. In collaboration with parents, teachers, students and the school community as a whole, the school communicates high and realistic expectations to all students and strive to provide them with the social, emotional, and academic supports they need in order to learn and grow.

The Grove offers a rich, varied, and challenging curriculum that connects equity and excellence together as educational goals. Our school recognizes and acts on the belief that children are multi-faceted individuals who deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. Students come to school with diverse backgrounds and varying learning styles; they possess their own strengths, needs, and interests.

The Grove seeks to help students grow as active, ethical, and responsible community members while they develop all aspects of their personhood. We provide extensive experiential learning opportunities for students that are based in the local community.

Our school offers a fun, nurturing, productive, and sustainable environment for students to enjoy learning!

6. Curriculum and Program

The curriculum and program of the Grove Community School is founded on a unique image of the learner, the learning environment, and the lived curriculum. Each differs substantially from dominant models in mainstream and existing alternative schooling.

Image of the Learner

It is imperative that youth from all parts of the world participate actively in all relevant levels of decision-making processes because it affects their lives today and has implications for their futures. In addition to their intellectual contribution and their ability to mobilize support, they bring unique perspectives that need to be taken into account.

- Agenda 21 Chapter 25.2, United Nations 1992 Rio Earth Summit

The School's image of the child as a learner is of a person who has social, emotional, physical, and academic needs that must be met if he or she is to reach full potential. We view each child as both a unique individual and a deeply connected social being.

Children's lives are greatly influenced by the health and well-being of their interconnected social and ecological environments. For example, it is impossible for our children to have healthy futures if their planet is sick. They are greatly affected by how the people around them relate to each other and to the natural systems of which we are all a part. [1] Young children thus deserve an environmental education that places paramount importance on the twin goals of "ecological sustainability and social justice within and between generations." [2]

Teaching and learning based on the value of radical individualism is not of real long-term benefit to children who are members of interdependent communities; therefore, the whole school community participates actively and in an ongoing way in the construction of a curriculum that emphasizes sustainability, social and restorative justice, cooperation, and mutual respect.

The Learning Environment

We define the curriculum as the total learning environment:

Children learn from what surrounds them — not just what the teacher points to them. So the curriculum is the textbooks, and the story books, and the pictures, and the seating plan, and the group work, and the posters, and the music, and the announcements... and readings, the languages spoken in the school, the food in the cafeteria, the visitors in the classrooms, the reception of parents in the office, the races (or race) of the office staff, the custodial staff, the administration, the displays of student work, the school teams and sports played, the clubs, the school logo or emblem, the field trips, the assignments and projects, the facial expressions and body language of everybody, the clothes everybody wears... (Nora Allingham, 1992 [former director of the Antiracism & Ethnocultural Equity Team, Ontario Ministry of Education and Training])

Teaching and learning activities at The Grove Community School are designed to further the goals expressed in the school's statement of philosophy, and follow a critical democratic approach. This means the curriculum embodies "a moral commitment to promote 'public good' over any individual's right to accumulate privilege and power. In this sense it suggests strong values for equality and social justice." [3] Building on our mission of community activism, and our commitment to experiential learning, students learn social justice and environmentalism through participation in projects inside and outside the classroom walls.

Since the curriculum (what is learned) is constituted by the total learning environment, and affects and is affected by every person within it, everyone in the school community must be seen as a learner and consequently be involved in working toward the resolution of questions, issues, and problems that arise in the daily life of the school. Staff, students, parents, and the broader community are empowered to contribute democratically and meaningfully to the shaping of curriculum defined in this broad way.

The Lived Curriculum: Ecological Sustainability and Socially-Just Community Activism

The Grove Community School places a joint emphasis on ecological sustainability and socially just community activism. Innovative within the TDSB, and even in Canada, the School seeks to fuse robust environmentalism and action-oriented equity education. This distinctive dual focus accomplishes a number of key goals.

Foremost, the experiential and democratic nature of the School brings a unique and innovative approach to the increasingly important and mandated field of environmental education. Students learn in, about, and for the environment. [4] Environmental education at the Grove Community School is to be "interdisciplinary, multi-disciplinary and super-disciplinary... about values, attitudes, ethics and actions. It is not a subject or an 'add-on'. ... It is a way of thinking and a way of practice." [5] Students at the School learn the principles of ecological literacy primarily through concrete experiences and community engagement.

Thematic, Experiential, Environmental Education

For example, each term, the whole school, or each class, chooses a focal theme or issue such as the evaluation of green space in a local neighbourhood, and then participates in a new or existing project taking place in the surrounding community, such as the planning and development of a community garden geared toward new immigrants. With parental and community support, the students might also choose to advocate at the local level or beyond for increases in safe green spaces in which children can play. Through participation in such projects, students would learn a variety of subjects from earth science, to history, to math and human geography, while also helping realize important local environmental initiatives.

Community-oriented Project Learning

At the same time, the Grove Community School's participation in such community-oriented projects will serve another very important purpose, the positive integration of the school into the local environs of Ward 9. Thematic units and action projects are designed to meet the needs of students and promote positive relationships with and in the local community. Criteria to consider when project planning could include:

  • Children feel empowered: do children feel like they are making a difference and can make decisions about their local environment and act upon those decisions in their communities?
  • Activism beyond program: after their involvement in the program, do children become involved in other environmental programs or activities?
  • Children see results: can the children see the results their activities have, for both the short- and long-term?
  • Community and school relationship: does the community have a positive or negative opinion of the school, and vice versa?
  • Activism beyond school grounds: are children involved in projects beyond the borders of the school grounds?
  • Community participates: are community citizens involved in the program and working with the students? [6]

In this way we strive to live up to our chosen designation as a 'Community School' and play a vital role in the life of our neighbourhood — as a dynamic hub for social justice, culture, and community service, as well as environmentally-focused education.

Diversity, Equity, and Representation

Two of the principles central to our school philosophy are diversity and equity. Given that the School is located in Davenport — the riding with the highest population of immigrants in all Ontario — these tenets must be fundamental. On this issue, our School community wishes to break with the tradition of alternative schools in Canada, which historically have not done a good job of enrolling a representative student body. The School is committed to outreach measures designed to attract a diverse, albeit 'alternative', student pool, as we grow.

However, we also have an innovative approach to diversity and equity in keeping with our community-based approach. We envision a scenario where we seek to collaborate with the parents of our host school on a variety of projects, thus extending our School's sense of community as we all learn from each other. In particular, as we work hard to increase the racial, ethno-cultural, and socio-economic diversity in the early years of the school, we seek to exchange ideas and perspectives with the more diverse families from the broader host school community.

Engaging, Relevant, Dynamic Curriculum

For the curriculum to be engaging, it has to focus on issues that are relevant and meaningful to the students and the communities in which they live. It is a curriculum that balances attention to the local and the global; the familiar and the unfamiliar. The school's curriculum is connected to the real world, so it does not shy away from exploring sensitive, or controversial issues. Ultimately, it reflects the lives and experiences of the young people who are learning it, and it helps develop in students a strong sense of their own dignity and self worth.

A curriculum such as this is necessarily a work in progress and open to ongoing revision. Currently we have drafted an Elaboration of Key Curriculum Elements (see appendix 1), a sample Grade 3 Unit of Study (see appendix 2), a sample weekly timetable for a Grade 2 Class (see appendix 3), and a sample Grade 1 Classroom Layout (see appendix 4) We would expect each of these to change and evolve based on the participation of staff, students, parents and other community members in the curriculum development process.

7. Why the Grove Community School is Unique

Our goal as educators is to present a sense of hopefulness to students, and the competence to act on that hope," he says. "That's different from wishful thinking — ignoring problems or assuming that somehow technology or some mythical 'they' is going to figure it out. We will have to figure it out. A whole set of diverse disciplines, for example, come together in the building project, suggesting a very different curriculum and pedagogy.

David Orr, Environmental Educator

At the heart of the Grove Community School's unique character is a distinct approach to curriculum content and pedagogy.

Ecological Sustainability and Social Justice

The Grove Community School is founded on the belief that the quality of children's learning and their ability to realize their life potential is intimately related to the health and wellness of their interconnected ecological and social environments. As a result, we see sustainability and social justice education as inextricably linked.

The School's emphasis on both ecological sustainability and socially just community activism distinguishes it among elementary schools in Toronto, and has proven to be extraordinarily appealing to progressive parents and educators. No other TDSB school, alternative or mainstream, seeks to fuse robust environmentalism and action-oriented equity education. Indeed, there is currently no school in Canada with this stated mission.

Our distinct vision and values framework permeate all we do. Daily teaching and learning activities at the School are designed to further the goals expressed in our Statement of Philosophy. Notably, the School is exceptional insofar as it connects equity and excellence together as educational goals, and is committed to communicating and supporting the attainment of high and realistic expectations for all students.

The community-centred, experiential, and democratic nature of the School's pedagogy brings a unique and innovative approach to the increasingly important and mandated field of environmental education. As we explain in our Proposed Curriculum and Program, students learn in, about, and for the environment. [7] Environmental education at the Grove Community School are inter- and multi-disciplinary... about values, attitudes, ethics and actions, rather than a subject or an 'add-on'. ... It is a way of thinking and a way of practice. [8] Students at the School learn the principles of ecological literacy primarily through concrete experiences and community engagement.

Community-Centred Learning

However, we also have an innovative approach to diversity and equity in keeping with our community-based approach. We seek to collaborate with the parents of our host school on a variety of projects, thus extending our School's sense of community as we all learn from each other. In particular, as we work hard to increase the racial, ethno-cultural, and socio-economic diversity in the early years of the school, we seek to exchange ideas and perspectives with the more diverse families from the broader host school community.

While the Grove Community School nourishes the individual needs of all students, it will be a community-centred school in which students, parents, teachers, and community members work together in a cooperative, consensus-building way to learn from each other and to solve real problems that are important to all. And unlike most schools, the Grove not only supports the needs of students enrolled in the school but builds a hub of community learning. Parents are encouraged to see themselves as life long learners to promote a culture of investigation, curiosity and involvement that would see adult learning circles, adult education classes, town halls, book clubs, parenting support groups and yoga classes.

The School's community-centered education prepares students and the broader school community to learn with understanding by moving them beyond memorizing facts to understanding the significance of what they are learning. Student learning focuses on real, authentic problems that students recognize as important for everyone in their community and encourage cooperation because they understand that often problems are too complex for one person to solve alone.

The other unique aspect to the Grove is that it looks beyond human centered communities and strives to connect students and their families with the natural communities they are embedded in.

Democratic Decision-making, Learning, and Practice

Students at the Grove Community School share significantly in the making of decisions about their education, including the curriculum. For example, they have ongoing and regular opportunities through weekly class meetings, weekly and monthly school-community forums, and other teacher-student/adult-child co-facilitated dialogues to help shape the agenda and direction of their individual and group learning. This includes substantial input into determining topic and project choices, and the depth and breadth in which various issues and themes are explored.

Students also share power with teachers and other adults in making decisions about how their classes operate in an ongoing way. The teaching-learning process incorporates democratic elements. For example, students help assess and evaluate their own learning (anecdotally and more formally) in relation to goals they themselves have helped determine, and work with each other and other adults in the school and beyond to meet them. Teachers and other adults in the school place a high priority on helping to support learners in acquiring meta-cognition.

Democratic skills are taught explicitly and implicitly inside the classroom and in whole school settings. For example, students are specifically taught and have many opportunities to practice chairing discussions, working cooperatively in small groups, disagreeing respectfully, negotiating compromises, etc. In an ongoing way, students also engage in many collaborative activities that encourage reflection, active listening, problem-posing, problem-solving, analysis and other critical thinking skills.

Students also have many opportunities to practice democracy as members of the larger school community. They play meaningful roles in the governance of the school, alongside teachers, other staff, parents, and the broader community. They are supported to help set and revise school policies through committees and school-wide conversations.

Critical Pedagogy

Critical pedagogy commits educators to take seriously a number of concerns: the democratic purposes of schooling; the inevitability of the political dimensions of education and teaching; the importance of dealing explicitly with issues of race, class, gender, sexuality and all embodiments of social difference as a concern for social justice; the centrality of the notion of 'praxis' (Freire 1998); and the inter-connectedness of voice, community, and curriculum. (95) [9]

Critical pedagogy, as an approach, seeks to raise learners' awareness of social justice and injustice. The aim is to achieve critical consciousness, which enables learners to recognize connections between their individual problems and experiences and the social contexts in which they are embedded. Critical pedagogy is particularly concerned with reconfiguring the traditional student/teacher relationship, where the teacher is the 'one who knows', and the students are the passive recipients of the teacher's knowledge.

At the Grove Community School, the classroom is a space where new knowledge, grounded in the experiences of students and teachers alike (as well as parents and other community members), is produced through meaningful dialogue. This learning environment will be both validating and empowering for our students as they discover that their experiences are valuable and their actions have an impact.

Teachers and other educators in the School create authentic learning opportunities for students through the widespread use of problem-posing approaches and methods. [10] In brief, such processes begin with the naming of students' own experiences. Then communities of learners identify, investigate, and pose 'problems' within their own lives. (Here students play a powerful role generating knowledge about a problem; brainstorming how to learn more; defining what is most important to investigate; defining priorities. Teachers also play a vital role facilitating the research process; helping students conceptualize and articulate thoughts; asking provocative questions about issues and their connections to students' lives.) Next students and teachers decide together how to solve the problems they have identified, and then they act to do so.

This approach would be exemplified in a Grove Community School classroom examining the influence of the media on students' lives. A critical, media pedagogy seeks to make visible how and why certain representations of race, class, gender, etc., are constructed in the media, and to ask whose interests these representations serve.

The outcome of this exercise would be that learners are able to recognize and critically engage all forms of social injustice, as reflected in social and cultural institutions of our daily life, and work towards democratic transformation and social change.

Experiential Learning

Experiential learning goes beyond traditional book-learning and memorization, instead acknowledging the social as well as the strictly academic aspects of learning. In the words of David Orr, "The modern curriculum (has) fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines and sub-disciplines. As a result, after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad integrated sense of the unity of things. The consequences for their personhood and for the planet are large. Experiential learning goes beyond the disciplines. It engages the voice of students in active roles for the purpose of learning. Students participate in a real activity with real consequences for the purpose of meeting learning objectives that they have helped to identify.

At the Grove Community School we expect experiential education to look like the integration of tools like games, simulations, role-plays and have them be a more central part of the curriculum. Experiential education should also transform the way teachers and students view knowledge so that it becomes active, something that is engaged with. The role of the teacher then is more than transmitter of information or knowledge but someone who provides experiences that engage students to actively connect with the world around them in a state of wonder, awe and curiosity. Ideally, students become knowledge creators (for themselves) as well as knowledge gatherers.

Because fostering students to become active learners, often takes them outside of the classroom, teaching styles need to be flexible to be able to seize the opportunities for active learning as it comes. Curriculum becomes a living practice of daily reflection and adaptation.

Our school is a place that celebrates learning and knowledge but also builds on the notion that knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world. This means that we cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities. Because we live in a world where knowledge is applied and decisions are made with no real connection to local communities, having a school building relationships with and knowledge in connection with a particular community fosters a culture of responsibility and an awareness about how decisions being made by those who currently hold power affect the local communities the school is connected to.

The concept puts students at the centre of their own learning, immersing them in a process of inquiry that begins with the student's own knowledge and shows them how to find answers to their own questions. In this model, teachers become mentors and students learn to think for themselves, work collaboratively with others, and create new knowledge by following their own curiosity.

Whether it is as part of a project about social justice or ecology, the Grove Community School is a place where interaction, sharing, questioning and discussion are the norm, and differing approaches lend perspective to thoughtful, reasoned debate.

The Grove Community School's teachers organize and facilitate direct experiences for students, often using preparatory and reflective exercises, which leads to genuine (meaningful and long-lasting) learning.

Peace-Making / Restorative Justice

The Grove Community School is a peaceable school that practices a restorative justice approach to discipline. [11] All educators in the school community, and especially teachers and parents/guardians, are expected to model restorative practices that avoid punishment, and move along a continuum from consequences, to solutions, to restoration. This is a much more time-consuming approach to discipline than is practiced in mainstream schools, but it is one that the School sees as worthwhile due to its focus on collaboration, inclusion, and the need to put things right (restoration).

Conflict, a necessary and natural part of the learning process, is acknowledged in the curriculum and in daily interactions, and handled in a manner that honors and respects differences. Students explicitly learn and practice conflict resolution (management) strategies including negotiation, mediation, and consensus building throughout their participation in the life of the School. When students break School rules, they are supported to understand how "misbehavior is primarily an offense against human relationships." [12] Students are taught to understand the real harm done by their misbehavior, to take responsibility, and to commit to positive change.

Regular routines further emphasize an emotional ethos of care in the School. This is evident, for example, in the use of opening and closing rituals (welcoming and closing circles), regular community-building activities (such as Wednesday whole school meetings and Monday/Thursday drumming/music/sing-alongs), and weekly Peace-making/Restorative Justice (conflict management) sessions (proactive and restorative)

There is also strong evidence of a physical ethos of care in all areas of the School. For example, classrooms provide inviting and safe spaces for students, parents, and other regular visitors that encourage and facilitate collaborative and restorative work (they include comfortable seating for both adults and children; quiet spaces for conversation ('peace tables' and 'negotiation corners'; furniture that moves to allow for multiple groupings).

Footnotes

1. Orr, D. Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World, p.92 cited in TDSB (2007), Grasp: A tool for developing ecological literacy through rich performance tasks, p.6.(back)

2. Davis, J. (1998) "Young children, environmental education and the future," p.146. In N. Graves (ed.) Education and the Environment. Essex: Formara.(back)

3. Goodman, J. (1992) Elementary schooling for critical democracy. Albany, NY: Suny Press. (pp.7-8) in McMahon, Brenda and Portelli, John P. (2004), 'Engagement for What? Beyond Popular Discourses of Students Engagement', Leadership and Policy in Schools, 3:1, 59-76 (p. 61).(back)

4. Working Party to the Queensland Board of Teacher Registration, 1993:23(back)

5. Davis, J. (1998) "Young children, environmental education and the future," p.146. In N. Graves ed.) Education and the Environment. Essex: Formara. (back)

6. Clark, C.M. (2002) Kids Planning Our Environment: Environmental Education as a Tool for Community Stewardship, Unpublished M.A. Thesis, p.19.(back)

7. Working Party to the Queensland Board of Teacher Registration, 1993:23.(back)

8. Davis, J. (1998) "Young children, environmental education and the future," p.146. In N. Graves ed.) Education and the Environment. Essex: Formara. (back)

9. Vibert et al. (2002), op cit.(back)

10. This paragraph draws extensively from Wink, J. (1997) Critical Pedagogy: Notes from the Real World. New York: Longman, p. 127.(back)

11. In his Little Book of Restorative Justice, Zehr spells out the basic principles of restorative justice:

  1. Focus on harms and consequent needs (the victims', as well as the communities' and the offenders').
  2. Addresses obligations resulting from those harms (the offenders', but also the communities' and the society's).
  3. Uses inclusive, collaborative processes.
  4. Involves those with legitimate stake in the situation (victims, offenders, community members, society).
  5. Seeks to put right the wrongs.

(back)

12. Little Book of Restorative Discipline for Schools, p. 74(back)