A new charter high school proposal.

R. Buckminster Fuller High School of Design Science and the Arts

R. Buckminster Fuller, known by his friends as “Bucky”, has undeniably been one of the key innovators in the 20th century. He is known as a philosopher, thinker, visionary, inventor, architect, engineer, mathematician, poet, cosmologist, and more. Fuller is the inventor of the Geodesic dome, and was a pioneer in utilizing basic geometrical shapes in design.

A key focus for Buckminster Fuller was the development of what he called “Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science” which is the attempt to anticipate and solve humanity’s major problems by providing “more and more life support for everybody, with less and less resources.” Fuller routinely demonstrated his ideas in what he called “artifacts”, tangible prototypes or models of designs and principles.
Bucky was the person most responsible for making the terms “synergy” and “ecology” common terms.

The Dymaxion Map of the world, developed by Fuller, is the first world projection to show the continents on a flat surface without visible distortion. Furthermore, this view shows the earth as being essentially one island in one ocean.

Buckminster Fuller was one of the first futurists and global thinkers. He is the one who coined the term “Spaceship Earth”, and his work has inspired and paved the way for many who came after him (Alvin Toffler, Joel Barker etc.).

At the time of death, Fuller had the greatest number of lines in “Who’s Who in the World.” This symbolized the diversity of his contributions as well as his impact throughout the world.

A Distinctive Culture for Learning

Rather than emphasizing the broad-not-deep approach to subjects typically employed by the traditional large high school, our school will use a negotiated, emergent curriculum and project-based learning to deeply integrate the sciences and arts along a theme of environmental sustainability. A small initial enrollment of 48 freshmen and a healthy ratio of adults to students will help the school’s population form strong bonds and strong community. The school will focus on developing functional literacy by combining advanced social technologies (see Documenting Best Practices, below) with student presentation and demonstration of concepts and hypotheses in multiple representational forms. The graphic and expressive arts, such as digital media production, sculpture, interactive dance, and print will be used as tools for cognitive, linguistic, and social development, creating students who are well prepared for working in the complex 21st century economy. Our school will foster a sense of student ownership by deeply involving students in the development, maintenance, and continuous improvement of the school’s information, best practices documentation, and physical environment—an environment we will make the “third teacher” of the school in the best traditions of Reggio Emilia and Montessori.

Sustainability through the Arts and Sciences

The new school will train and educate students towards a deeper and more meaningful integration between science and the arts, preparing them for work in a complex world that demands skilled thinkers and talented creators. Students in the 21st century must learn to work and plan together, and they will practice this experience in our school. A set of guiding principles will be used to orchestrate the growth of student thinking on subjects such as:

• Humanity’s long-term environmental sustainability
• The impact of advanced technologies on indigenous populations
• The growth and health of city populations
• Effective engineering and design for a more sustainable future
• The sustainability of the arts as an expression of mass culture
• The use of the arts to make our environmental impact emotionally accessible to mass culture

The arts curriculum will emphasize the safe self-expression that builds sensory awareness and discrimination, and which can be applied to any domain of expression. These foundations will be used in the instruction of sculpture, mass media, painting, music, dance, and new media arts such as digital art, photography, and video. We will also emphasize artistic integrity throughout the process; how to make honest art and honest self-expression. We will use the creative encounter technique pioneered by art educator Peter London to achieve this goal.

Governance

There will be one administrator who will come from the staff. There will a Governing Council, comprised of a majority of parents and the school staff. This council will be responsible for signing off on the education plan and budget. The teacher-administrator will be responsible for coordinating the activities of the Council, as well as maintaining the day-to-day operation of the school. However, every effort will be made to automate and minimize the amount of time needed for these activities through use of the social technologies described below; this will free a valuable resource for more direct interaction with teachers, parents, and students.

Special Education

The school will use an inclusion model to handle students with special needs, making every effort to integrate these students within the school population. Special education students will receive services in team taught classes and attention in the use of the social technologies and resources that form the school’s core. All teachers will adapt curriculum and assessment to conform to each student’s IEP.

School as Community: A Constellation of Learners

Schools are people. More than books, facilities, or curricula, people are what make a school. In order to grow with sustainability, the activities of the school will grow its teachers and its students as one team. Teachers teach students, and students teach teachers. Teachers will also learn from one another, as a significant portion of each teacher’s time will be allocated to attending the classes and projects initiated and taught by the other teachers.

A major part of the school’s educational efforts will be directed into its surrounding community, making the efforts of the students and teachers more visible to the families, businesses, and community organizations that support them. By hosting learning events at nearby locations outside the school building itself, the school will become more visible and tangible to the hosting community; this will in turn encourage the participation and contribution of the hosting community in the growth of the school. Parents, business owners and workers, and students and professors in higher learning organizations such as UWM, MATC, MIAD, and Marquette University will be given a real-time view into school activities from outside the building through the school’s knowledge management system (see Documenting Best Practices, below.) Passionate and committed members of the surrounding community will be asked to serve on the school’s Community Advisory Board, a group responsible for assembling a list of priorities and goals for the school’s involvement in the community as well as advising the school staff and students on changes in the community that may have drastic effects on the school’s performance and sustainability. This free flow of information between the school and the community will ensure the healthy growth of each.

Growing Students and Teachers

A significant portion of staff time will be allocated to the mental and physical growth and health of the teaching staff. The school will maintain a staff of passionate teachers by committing a significant portion of its resources to ensuring that teachers have opportunities to grow. This will include:

• Leadership training
• On- and off-site communications training
• Continuous technology training
• Conflict resolution training
• Exposure to community cultural events: teachers should be taking in the arts of our culture as they teach them to the students of our culture

Teachers will attend these sessions together, in order to build a strong sense of community within their group. Teachers will enjoy these experiences, and will use the school’s social technology to document what they learn for the benefit of the students and the school population. The growth of the teachers will make healthier the growth of the school and its students.

Emergence: More learning in less time

Doing more with less is the hallmark of Buckminster Fuller’s vision for humanity, and our school will reflect this value in the design of its curriculum and class activities. Rather than tightly regimenting the expense of each moment of class time, classes will be structured from the start so that students can learn at their own pace with the help of the teacher and the other students. Each learning session will be designed by teachers to use hands-on activity, changing back and forth from interactive play to “processing” and discussion. During both play and discussion, students will document their own learning experience using the social technologies described in this document. Time-lapse and regular video footage will be used to review class activities during the processing phase of each class. These media materials become the seeds of future classes, further reducing the time needed to “ramp up” to full readiness on a subject of focus.

Practical Balanced Literacy

In today’s world, knowing which information to forget is as important as knowing which information to remember—there is simply too much information to remember it all. At the same time, new forms of hypermedia such as websites and digital books have utterly changed the nature of literacy itself. These new technologies have made distilling the details to the essentials a critical advanced thinking skill for workers in the 21st century economy.

The social technologies employed by the school will foster the growth of more than just basic literacy within the students. Students will consume and produce a wide variety of sophisticated media while practicing healthy knowledge management: students and teachers together are charged with creating a digital “knowledge base” within the school. This knowledge base encapsulates the learning of the school in literary forms, interweaving advanced media such as photography and digital video with text and hypermedia. The formation and management of this knowledge base gives students the advanced literacy skills required to be competitive in today’s workforce.

Students entering the program must have basic reading and writing skills. All students will be assessed initially to evaluate their reading and writing abilities using a reading and writing test. The results of this assessment will be used to determine the students’ reading level. Students requiring remediation will receive close and direct instruction from teachers and other students to advance the level of their reading ability. Once basic and balanced literacy goals are met, the student will improve their literacy skills by developing the school’s knowledge base as described below.

Curriculum Planning and Design

An emergent curriculum is one that builds upon the interests of the students. Teachers will capture topics of study from frequent group discussion with students, using community events, family events and the interests of the students to build a core focus around which the teacher will frame the state standards and MPS requirements. Team planning is an essential component of this emergent curriculum. Teachers, acting as leaders, will work closely with students, parents, and the surrounding community to plan in-depth projects to study concepts, ideas, and interests that arise within the group. These projects may last for a week or a school year. Throughout the project, teachers will help students make decisions about the direction of their study and the representational medium that best demonstrates and showcases the topic. These projects will then conclude with student presentations and demonstrations in multiple representational forms, integrating the graphic and expressive arts such as print, construction, and drama with digital media such as video and photography. This ‘negotiated curriculum’ will capture the constructive, continual and reciprocal relation among teachers, children, parents, and learning standards, providing students with a narrative learning experience that is richly bound with the personal experience of their lives.

Continuously Documenting Best Practices: Social Technology

The school will employ an elegant selection of social technology to enable teachers and students to communicate and collaborate with one another effectively and instantaneously. The most advanced technologies to emerge from the Internet will be interwoven throughout the design of the physical environment, throughout the interactions between students, teachers, parents, and the surrounding community, and throughout the curriculum. These social technologies will allow the school to learn from its own activities, preserving the ideas that work well while freeing the organization to make ideas that work better; documenting the best practices of both teachers and students. Students emerging from this experience will be well-prepared knowledge workers, ready for college, and seasoned in research and media production: critical skills in the 21st century.

These social technologies will be used to create the ever-changing, ever-growing knowledge base that sustains the school. As teachers, students, parents, and the surrounding community changes, the quality of the information possessed by the school will remain high. The knowledge base supports our goal of encouraging students and teachers to take ownership in the longer-term health of the school, because the information they contribute to the knowledge base will continue to improve the quality of the students’ lives long after they leave the school: they can take it with them, online.

The school will employ a set of open source technologies in concert with commercially available technologies to enable teachers, students, and parents to communicate, document, administer, and generate new knowledge, information, and media. The five main functions of social technology (and thus of functional 21st century literacy) include:

Finding things: Googles

The world’s most popular search engine, Google, uses an innovative technique to rank and select pages to include in the search results. We will employ a local google to index and locate knowledge from within our local knowledge management system. Our local google will make it easy for the school’s population to find things.

Learning things: Moodles

Moodle is an open-source online course management system, designed specifically to manage internet-based educational courses. The design is influenced strongly by progressive ideas of educational theory such as social constructionism (it started out as a PhD research project).

Our local moodle will allow students from the school (as well as other distance learners who wish to be members of the school’s extended learning population) to take courses and complete assignments online from home or from other remote locations.

Sharing the story: Blogs

The term ‘blog’ is short for ‘weblog’, and is a general term for a set of social technologies that empower its users to share their diary or journal online with a wide population. The blog phenomenon is popularized by technologies such as LiveJournal, which many highschool-age students already use to share the experience of their daily lives with their peers online.

The school will use blogs to document the achievements and accomplishments of students and classes in the school. Each student will have their own blog, and will maintain it throughout their entire school experience—both during summers and during school years. Classes will publish their achievements using a group blog routinely updated by the students in the class. The entire school population will thus be able to keep informed about the goings-on within the school: blogs can be syndicated automatically to major media news sources such as local television and newspaper outlets, providing a wonderful opportunity for the school to announce its achievements to the world.

Organizing and creating knowledge: Wikis

“Wiki wiki” is Hawaiian for ‘quick’, and is an apt name for what the originator of the first Wiki, Ward Cunningham, described as “The simplest online database that could possibly work.” Librarians and informologists would refer to it as a bottom-up, open-loop knowledge management system with an emergent taxonomy.

A Wiki is a collaboratively-edited website which many people also view as a democratic and open publishing tool. The distinguishing feature of wikis is that they typically allow all users to edit any page, with full freedom to edit, change and delete the work of previous authors. When writing a wiki page, users join capitalized words or surrounding them with special characters which causes the taxonomy and organization of the Wiki to emerge from its use: documents and articles are automatically connected to one another by the Wiki software.

The first Wiki was started in 1995, and is still active in 2004 with tens of thousands of pages. The Wikipedia project was started on January 15th, 2001 to create a wiki-based free content encyclopedia with supporting almanac-like and gazetteer-like information. Free means both free to use and free to edit. Wikipedia is multilingual, and an open-content, collaboratively developed creation, managed and operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. As of February 2004, it contains over 210,000 articles in English, and over 280,000 articles in other languages—all created by interested users from around the world simply donating their time and energy.

The school will use a local wiki to perform its open-loop, bottom-up knowledge management. The entire school population will contribute to and consume the wiki, which will grow to include its textbooks, documentation, media files, and collected learning. This wiki will then be intersyndicated with other wikis throughout the world (such as the Wikipedia), creating a high-quality global knowledge management system that can be shared with other schools and communities.

Measuring quality and growth: Everythings

The Everything2 website, located at www.everything2.com, is a shining example of social technology in action. The goal of Everything2 is to create a repository of all human knowledge; like a Wiki, anyone can contribute. However, as writers submit materials, other writers evaluate the materials using an innovative voting system that rewards quality writing while encouraging growth where quality is lacking. As a result, the quality of the writing in the system as a whole increases over time. As of the time of this writing, Everything2 has over 500,000 articles in 900,000 writeups and an active writer population of 60,000 contributors. Students and teachers will involve themselves in this self-regulating literary community to enhance dramatically their writing skills, growing practical balanced literacy.

Our ‘local’ everything will be used to create the final ‘draft’ that we present to the world of the knowledge organized and accumulated by the school’s activities and population. Much of the content from our school’s everything will be syndicated to the public Everything2 website for an even wider evaluation by a global community, who will thereby contribute their time and energy to the health and growth of the school for free.

Assessment

RBF will combine traditional assessments like Terra Nova and WKCE with a variety of real-time assessment tools, much of which will be portfolio and project driven. Students will be expected (along with teachers) to make major contributions to the school’s social technology and knowledge management system, and these contributions will be submitted and syndicated to the global community for wider review and involvement through the Internet. Staff, students, and parents will be able to view in real-time the performance of the school as measured by all gathered statistics, including ACT, SAT, reading level assessments, tardiness, suspensions, grade points, and project participation using the school’s knowledge management system.

Fiscal Responsibility

The teacher-administrator, working in concert with the school’s Governance Council, will present a detailed financial summary (maintained within the school’s knowledge management system) to the members of the Council each time they meet. This information will be used to plan new fund allocations and maintain a strict awareness of budgetary constraints. The leadership of the school will constantly strive to reduce costs while increasing the effectiveness of the school’s use of resources.