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.

As the saying goes, it takes all kinds of different people to make the world go round. Or, at least, it helps.

We make our unique imprints on the earth – footsteps maybe – that only we can make. Without our feet those footsteps would simply never walk the earth.

Ideally, our children, over 14 years of schooling in public education will encounter all kinds of different ways of knowing, and doing, and being in the world. As they do, they weave their own personality into an entity that couldn’t have become without all the other threads encountered in the formation.

This brings me to Adam Cross, from Lyn Public School, in Lyn, Ontario. As you’ll hear, Adam likes to leave the doing and being to the students, offering some insightful knowing in moments where it makes sense. Otherwise, he’d be hard pressed to articulate the powerful learning that he facilitated in his classroom throughout the 2023 school year.

One reason for this is his belief in the capacity of children, the capacity of his students. Adam is hardly surprised that his students managed to navigate the real world with such grace. It has always been the case, and it will continue, as always. Adam walks the earth with calmness in search of meaning.

So, when students at Lyn Public School expressed concern for the environment, and an eagerness to educate the community to preserve and protect the earth, Adam sought out partnerships with the likes of Kelly McGann, The Cataraqui Trail, Frontenac Arch Biosphere Reserve and the Lyn Valley Conservation Area. His students began developing a story walk trail with their own stories sharing learnings and teachings. The stories morphed into mobile installations that can be moved to create story trails in conservation areas all over the region.

A year later, the projects are continuing and expanding; and students who have since moved on to Secondary schools in the UCDSB are regularly asking what’s happening, where are the stories going next.

Adam wouldn’t put too much attention on all this learning. Fortunately, we have a podcast for that.

In education, and beyond, we hear it all too often. It’s a disdain for youth. How this generation of young people is failing – at the essentials, at life, in school. It is a comment of frustration and apathy and disregard. Kids today.

If you work in our schools you witness a different reality. In social media vernacular, despite the challenges of being young and growing up, the kids are alright.

In the case of students from Vankleek Hill Collegiate Institute in Vankleek Hill, Ontario, alright doesn’t do justice for how the kids are doing.

Following their remarkably humble educator, Turner Onion, students at VCI helped to reimagine what a business course might do in the act of learning. The learning focused on a problem and how business-sense, and entrepreneurial spirit could address it: if students designed a learning commons with their needs in mind, what would the design be? The project began there. How to move a design from paper to reality, well that took all the real-world learning acumen you can imagine.

In the summer of 2023, as things were winding down in Ontario schools, students, staff, and the community were putting the finishing touches on a year-long project that brought a school together. Turner would tell you that the success belongs to the students. He’s right, it does.

What he might forget to tell you is that his leadership, vision, and willingness to make room for learning and follow the students was the catalyst and, ultimately, the path to success.

Erika Christakis, the author of the bestselling book The Importance of Being Little argues that when it comes to children and learning, adults have “a profound lack of faith in what young children are capable of.”  

Christakis also points out that “children are wired with the capacity for learning.”  

Let’s start with capacity, then: the depths to which an individual can reach into their superpowers when faced with a challenge to employ them.   

In the UCDSB’s Power Up Program, we work to discover children's superpowers as a means to thriving in school. Alexander Den Heijer’s  words guide us: “When a flower doesn’t bloom you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.”  

If you ask Mariah Gallacher she’ll tell you all the stories of the children from her Power Up classroom at Commonwealth PS in Brockville, ON. She’ll tell you where things began. She’ll tell you how the concern of one child became the project of many children. She’ll tell you about the children who found their voices while learning to teach. She’ll tell you - with total humility - how she came to be the documentarian of the journey of a group of children towards learning no one expected – not even her, not even the children entrusted to her care. Where there was hope, eventually the stories came to life. The flowers bloomed.  

In the UCDSB we sometimes remark on hope as data. We view this x-factor, this invisible driver, as essential to student success. Why? It’s back to this idea of capacity.  

When it comes to real-world learning, and children, it turns out that there is a limitless capacity to tap into when the purpose of the learning is tethered to meaningful work that reaches beyond the walls of school.  

Even more so the case for students whose promise is atrophying in the moment. Fix the environment, not the flower. 

In this episode of The Real-World Learning Podcast we discover that an ordinary concern of an observant child can lead to extraordinary things.  

Can you see it? No, no, over there. Look closely, can you see it now?  

It’s a classroom.  

Well, yes, you’re right it’s ALSO a trail, a nature reserve, a land trust, a provincial park. No doubt this classroom is also those things too. First and foremost, it’s a classroom.  

And the best part is this classroom doesn’t need anything else to become a learning experience. It’s an all-inclusive optimal learning space primed for learning adventures.  

When students at Pakenham PS arrived at High Lonesome Nature Reserve they were naturally filled with questions. Just as it has for millennia, nature sparked an unquelled thirst for wonder in the students who found themselves surrounded by it one day in the Fall of 2022.  

What followed was the magic of real-world learning: begin outside the walls of school, begin with fascinations that unveil themselves as students wonder, and the learning takes care of itself – or at least the adventure does. All of the sudden the curriculum, contextualized, holds purpose. If I am full of questions, and you can help me grow into new ideas, you’re the kind of teacher I am looking for. And the amazing thing is, our communities are full of teachers, they are everywhere. 

When Jaime Hewitt began the adventure, she began with the same first steps as her students. The hike that followed was a career altering experience. In this episode, the first of our second season, you’ll hear what real-world learning looks like in the classroom that is our planet.  

Now can you see it? If you’re looking out a window you can see just what I mean. Nature is an edifice unto itself. It just needs you, calls your students, to know it more intimately. Into the wild we go.  

What if every class began with the provocation, “What if our class could help even just one person?”  

What if the response to this possibility began a year-long learning adventure that helped people?  

What if the curriculum was contextualized to serve the help a community needs, as a toolbox, and students saw their labour, their learning, as contributing to a better community? One, maybe, in their own vision. Maybe, one, from their dreams.  

In all the discussion about engagement there is a glaring piece missing from the conversation: students, like all of us, seek purpose in their lives and their learning. Beginning with challenges that students want to participate in solving – beginning with meaning - serves a dual purpose: first, students see themselves as agents in transforming the society in which they live; second, in the act of transforming society, one can’t help but be changed, and transformed, themselves.  

Grade 5 & 6 students at Pleasant Corners Public School in Vankleek Hill, Ontario, learned with these big ideas in mind for the entirety of the 22/23 school year. In the process they raised thousands of dollars, improving their community, near and far, with energy and drive, and as the learning in their classroom.  

On June 15th, the students launched 10 entrepreneurial concepts at their year-end BBQ. The school became a carnival of creativity and original ideas, full of the community seeing the students, remarking on their superpowers. The students in turn saw themselves as agents in their community, and the world beyond school. The students raised over $4000 in less than two-hours. Who did they help? How did they help? That’s what this episode of The Real-World Learning Podcast is about.