The RWL Podcast has a purpose: to share stories of learning in the Upper Canada District School Board as told by the teachers and students leading them. Our conversations focus on projects that have happened. It’s often the ultimate reflective exercise: sit behind a microphone and tell the story. The shortcoming of this is that we often miss how projects continue beyond the school calendar; how students pass the project on to their peers. How teachers develop ideas with students that carry on and evolve in the teaching and learning relationship.

As a pedagogy, real-world learning has a curious spinoff – in practice, once in place, real-world learning is an enduring approach to teaching and learning. There is an infectious quality to the approach for students, teachers, schools and communities that outlasts the school calendar. Projects feed new projects; school calendars need to be played with because the work doesn’t end. Students choose to work on the projects during recess, after school, during summer vacation. The work feels like something else, because the impact of the work is so profound. The contribution student learning makes in the communities our schools live within means that a symbiotic relationship grows out of students making a difference – for all stakeholders. Schools become a hub of change, and are seen as a catalyst to continue change. UCDSB students are engendering improvements in their communities such that communities are asking for more learning to make further improvements. As one Secondary student commented, “I don’t like school, but I like helping people.”

This brings us to Chesterville Public School in Storment, Dundas, Glengarry Counties where students in Robyn Carriere’s 4/5, now 5/6 French Immersion class - have been learning about food insecurity and becoming solutionaries in their own backyards. What is unique about this conversation is that it is about the continuity of a project rather than showcasing a finished project. We are entering the conversation in a state of evolution and extension rather than conclusion. We hear about where things began, where they went, and where the initial project is reaching in the context of one school in the UCDSB.

Students in Robyn’s class look beyond the walls of their school, into their community, and they see need – tangible needs like access to healthy food, and equally important if intangible needs like well-being. 10- and 11-year-olds are making the connection between wellness and well-being seamlessly in a way that adults seemingly struggle to understand. When the students learned about the notion of core needs with community partner Christine Cross- Barkley from Faith Garden in Chesterville all bets were off. With emerging French language skills on display, the students spent the year learning French as a means to helping others.

It may just be the case that students are on to something here: school without contribution to community lacks direction. Learning that builds people while helping people involves an agency which forges the public education system into “the foundation of a prosperous, caring and civil society.”

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about superheroes. Not the capital “S” kind of superheroes, but lower case “s” superheroes, the everyday kind of superheroes that we often neglect to recognize. Sometimes, it seems, the extraordinary efforts of a caring soul, an individual that seeks to improve the world they encounter leaving it in a better state than what they discovered it in, sometimes we fail to see their accomplishments for what they are.

When it comes to children, lower case “s” superheroes are everywhere. In fact, in my wanderings around Eastern Ontario I’ve come to realize that schools are a hotbed for these superheroes. And real-world learning, the pedagogy that this podcast seeks to enliven, seems the impetus for so much superheroing: irrespective of age, grade, and perceived ability the UCDSB is a veritable wellspring of superheroes.

At South Crosby Public School in Elgin, Ontario, students in Leanne Huffman’s Power UP Two class have been quietly reaching beyond the walls of their school, disguised as average children who just want to help others, applying their superhuman strengths to feed a community. The irony, of course, is that superheroes have always been suspect of celebrity. They know that saving a planet, or feeding a community, warrants stardom, but is better served in quiet acknowledgements from the people you serve. And so, these mild-mannered, unassuming children at South Crosby have directed their hands and their hearts and their minds towards making healthy food more accessible one offering of produce at a time. What began as a bag of lettuce became fifty bags became one hundred; what started as an effort to help one community food hub became five community food hubs, serving all the communities that call South Crosby PS home.

If you ask these students to talk about the change-making they’re leading, they’ll likely give you a glance, and get back to work in earnest. They don’t have time for the story, they’re too busy making a difference. What’s more, with their purpose of feeding a community firmly in place, these superheroes are learning to read, and write, converse and do math in support of their real-world learning project. How do you make foundational skills engaging, you might ask? Make them part of the superhero as a whole. Teach a child to read, write and do math in service of a project that changes the world, and that child will spend a lifetime changing the world while helping others to see how they can join the pursuit.

Not all powers are created equally, but together they empower the superhero to be “Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!”

In this episode of the Real-World Learning podcast, the first of our ROOTS series, we talk to former Chair of the board Jeff McMillan and Principal Rich Tamblyn about their time as educators in the UCDSB and how they developed an approach to learning that they called the Current Experience Program. When you read about and watch video of the experience they helped promote in their classrooms, you see first-hand the connection between the school world and the real world. Students are in the field asking questions as they arise and proposing approaches to seek answers. It is what science, math, social science, and history look like when scientists, mathematicians, social scientists, and historians do them. It is how disciplines show up in the real world. Which begs the question: why would we learn them any differently than how they came to be subjects in the 1st place? Real-World Learning in the UCDSB is a pedagogical evolution that seeks to bring an approach to learning that Jeff and Rich were experimenting with 20 years ago to all our classrooms. In this episode of the Real-World Learning Podcast, Jeff, Rich, and previous students help us see the long-term impacts on teaching and learning of the current experience in the UCDSB.