Experts Creating Schools that Transform Communities
The School Factory is an incubator for the development of community-owned and operated learning centers and learning environments. We provide the leadership, infrastructure, and training to local community leaders who implement their center following a self-constructed design plan. The community center then becomes the backbone for the community’s transformation. Each center is unique, but inherits the best practices of every other center participating in the program through advanced social technologies. This diversity enriches the iterative and incremental growth of the program, causing its organic spread throughout the global community.
Who it Helps
School Factory programs help leaders. The primary recipients of program benefits are youth leaders in income-stressed, environmentally-stressed, and educationally-stressed urban communities and municipalities. These leaders are identified through partnerships with local schools and existing civic organizations, whose adult leadership nominates program participants. Some youth leadership is self-identifying, but most identification is expected to come through existing community channels through the nomination process. They are given the resources to create the transformation of their community, working under the direction of School Factory program participants. The primary benefit of this transformation goes to the members of the community, who work for their own common good in ways they themselves determine to be important using the center they have created. Secondary benefits accrue to future youth leaders in the community and existing adult leadership, who now have local infrastructure to support their development.
Diversity in Transformation
School Factory programs are targeted to regions with diversity-stress, and are designed to bring a healthy interaction between diversities. Areas where racial tension prevents healthy diversity in social experiences, school experiences, and cultural experiences in urban environments have limited growth. Racial tension will create a bad image of the city, which will slow its overall growth.
Likewise, along hotly contested religious or cultural boundaries, the School Factory’s universal and open approach to community transformation will work to make these diversities healthy together.
How it Works
Leaders in the arts, education, politics and commerce provide the expertise and best-practices to local community leaders, while working alongside them to establish the physical environments in which teaching and learning are to take place. These environments can range from underdeveloped urban wastelands to abandoned residential retail properties, mixed-use industrial buildings and heavily trafficked urban malls. Each new center thereby comes to attain the most relevant characteristics of its surrounding community, and is designed to help community members transform and grow their community through education and practice.
During the design process, teachers and students at local state-supported learning centers and schools are invited to provide real-world practical assistance to the project, working under the direction of local community leaders and School Factory guidance.
How it Spreads
Core Program Training
School Factory members and employees undergo a training process that gives them the tools to transform any community into a self-educating whole worldwide. This training process distills the present best practices that are emergent from the diversity of cases participating in the program. Previous alumni from the program engage with new and incumbent alumni to continuously improve and inform the process.
Carrying Training Forward
To ensure that the program itself improves in accordance with its experience, at least one member of the program recipient group must enroll in the program itself, ‘carrying forward’ the experience and expertise to a new community. School Factory growth is then part-funded through the community-sponsored revenues generated from enrollment in this field training process.
Social Technology Makes it Visible
Each School Factory produced center is, through its formation process, made part of the network of other centers worldwide through collaborative social technologies. As the School Factory core produces intellectual property, it creates new sources for intellectual property production—and the infrastructure that shares the results as quickly as possible. The School Factory borrows a page from the open source software development process, openly sharing the rights to innovative techniques and solutions with program participants while protecting these valuable resources from exploitation.
Stories that work are spread through this network, which will employ the Internet and mass-media forms such as television and print media. Each center becomes a contributor to the network through its membership, and acts as a nearest-neighbor resource for new member communities.
Where it Works
A School Factory can be opened in any environment, and uses local community resources to form a community center for creative transformation. Best practices and expertise work with local leaders to identify and partner with
- local funding sources, for resources
- local law enforcement and public safety organizations, for community health
- municipal and rural governments, for permits and support
- local state-supported schools, for teachers and students
- locally-owned small businesses, for grassroots marketing and promotional support
- local news and media producers, for more far-reaching promotional support
School Factory developments can take place along urban thresholds. As neighborhoods gentrify, an economic boundary forms around lower and higher income neighborhoods. These boundaries are rich with the potential for economic transformation through education. By using local resources, communities improve themselves without the expulsion of lower-income members due to gentrification; instead the wealth of higher-income community members tends to distribute itself evenly across the community through the development of the center and the transformation it supports.
Race-stressed gentrification is particularly addressed by this strategy. Many urban environments suffer from gentrification that coincidentally follows racial lines; this boundary only serves to exacerbate the challenge of racial harmony in cities.
School Factory developments can also take place within core urban communities.
Cultural Preservation
The nature of human learning is not specific to ambient political or religious systems; as much as possible School Factory produced centers should support the preservation of local culture and diversity. The health of the surrounding community comes from its continuity.
Program Details
A Curriculum in Creative Transformation
Creativity is a core component of the transformation process. Community participants are given training in effective brainstorming, collaboration, and communications as well as a comprehensive program for personal creative expression through the arts. Hands are encouraged to touch the community through beautifying work and practical play.
The formation of these centers, each specific to the needs of the community, act to both simultaneously apply what has been learned in other centers while generating new knowledge that is shared back to other centers.
internal targets - is what you change within yourself?
and external targets - is what you change within the world?
Case Studies (in progress)
These case studies apply to organizations that are in partnership with or who have
- Bucketworks - a creative resource center in Downtown Milwaukee
- GrowingPowerAquaGardens - aqua gardens inside schools that thrives on fluourescent light
- UrbanEcologyCenterUrbanLifeStudies - developing awareness of the urban environment
- SchoolFactoryCenter - environmental transformation is the model for the creation of our development facilities
- MilwaukeeCommunityUniversity - a development plan for the transformation of the Pabst properties in downtown Milwaukee
- BalataRefugeeCamp - News from the Balata Refugee Camp, where Israeli soldiers open fire on camp members who try to stop their jeeps from entering—with stones—reaches the world from the camp’s News project, which also covers the camp’s children’s theater and partnerships it has with schools in the United States.
Definitions
center or community center: the community learning environments described and established by the program
Earlier drafts
The School Factory is a group of people that think the best place to focus our energy is on public education.
The LearningBook is a work in progress. Feel free to contribute to it, making sure you add your name to the contributors. The book will change frequently, because it will never be finished. That’s part of the idea: it is unfinishable, just like learning itself.
- PrinciplesOfLearning
- WhyLearnNow
- SavingExtraTime
