Children, Youth and Environments

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 21 No. 1 (2011) ISSN: 1546-2250 Review of the film Lessons from the Real World (2011) Gregory Smith Lewis & Clark College Citation: Smith, Gregory. (2011). "Review of the film Lessons from the Real World (2011)." Children, Youth and Environments 21 (1). Bob Gliner, producer and director 57 minutes, $24.95. The film can be ordered from: http://www.docmakeronline.com Nearly three decades of the standards movement in the United States is beginning to affect the way younger school leaders are able to imagine other educational possibilities. Experienced principals talk about how counterparts in their twenties and early thirties raised on a diet of test prep and phonics know little about whole language approaches or more exploratory forms of inquiry. Similarly, educational publishers are hesitant to consider volumes that advocate localized learning experiences not tightly linked to prescribed curriculum, believing few teachers will be willing or able to implement such practices. It is as though Margaret Thatcher’s assertion that “There is no alternative” to economic globalization has taken root in the minds of many U.S. educators, preventing them from even thinking about more compelling and meaningful ways to teach. It is for this reason that Bob Gliner’s new film, Lessons from the Real World, is so valuable. A sociologist-filmmaker based at San Jose State University, Gliner has assembled a series of interviews and vignettes from a collection of elementary and secondary schools in Portland, Oregon that demonstrate how a commitment to the environment, social justice, and the cultivation of student voice can engender educational models that point in very different directions from those now being sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and its allies. At the heart of these efforts is a recognition of the importance of context and of situating learning in ways that resonate with students’ direct experience of the world. At the K-6 Sojourner School, students study water quality in a nearby wetlands, measuring turbidity and pH, determining how healthy this micro-environment is, and taking steps to make it even healthier. The object of an integrated unit that joins math, science, reading, poetry, and music, the wetlands have become a site where students learn, act, and create. Building on what they have experienced, for example, their music teacher asks students to write and then perform on marimbas and drums a composition that expresses their new understandings of topics such as photosynthesis. There is much to build on. As one girl observed, learning in this way is “cooler 364 than reading about it in a magazine. You can feel it, hear it, and touch it.” For teachers, these experiences provide a vehicle for helping students “see a global picture that is bigger than their narrow view of the world.” Several miles to the north, students at Jefferson High School engage in similar outside-ofclassroom investigations, this time of the social environment in surrounding neighborhoods. Designed as a means for deepening these primarily working-class students’ understanding about healthy democracies and healthy communities, this project leads them into local businesses and homes where they interview proprietors and residents about safety, crime, and ways the neighborhood has changed during the years they have been there. Students note that these experiences lead them to really pay attention to where they are living—both to its challenges and its assets. Their work in the community underlines the way that learning can often happen in unexpected places, outside the control or even intention of teachers. As it does so, students at Jefferson, like those at the Sojourner School, begin to see themselves in a bigger context and to take responsibility for their own learning. The Sunnyside Environmental School is one of Portland’s K-8 schools. Teachers there build much of their curriculum around local issues. Middle school students develop plans for the redesign of an urban block after on-the-ground investigations of the city’s transportation system, buildings, and parks. Upper elementary students collect information about bike use by interviewing people in a small commercial area a few blocks from the school. Intent on finding ways to reduce carbon emissions in the city, they ask about the frequency...