Those of you at the second week of James Madison and Constitutional Citizenship at Montpelier may have heard about my school and our work with Professor Harris. Our charter high school was created by a group of parents in 1998 with a mission to teach citizenship. From the beginning we tried to fulfill this mission by incorportaing lots of civic education and community service into our curriculum as well as trying to think about the skills and dispositions of a good citizen that we wanted to foster in our students. However, our efforts felt disparate and we felt as if we lacked the philisophical grounding for what we were doing as a school.
Then, I attended a weekend seminar at Montpelier and was introduced to Res Publica: An International Framework for Education in a Democracy. Found online at http://www.civiced.org/index.php?page=res_publica
My faculty studied portions of this document. Then we met at a retreat at Montpelier, heard from Professor Harris, and finally with all of that in mind, we got to work. We sat small groups of folks in different departments and tried to discover the commonalities in our approaches to teaching, to working with students, and to our disciplines. What we found was that there were clear principles guiding what we did as a school. Some of the principles we felt we lived up to, others we aspired to, but these principles (which we formed into a kind of Constitution) guided our school and were the philisophical basis for Constitutional citizenship mission.
So, here is our Constitution
Citizenship Preamble and Principles
We, of RCHS, intend to cultivate the understanding and practices that sustain individual self-determination and community self-government. We have adopted the following principles in order to ensure that all who pass through our halls can imagine, create, and govern a more perfect world.
We believe:
That a foundation of knowledge and ethics must precede all intellectual inquiry;
That if we
encourage self-awareness
build and maintain local communities
develop an awareness of our membership in ever larger communities
engage in common enterprises with people who are different
accommodate and address conflict and change
facilitate problem solving
foster balance and moderation in life
and take ownership and responsibility for learning
We will become good citizens.
We continue to work to use this document as a guide for our school and our programs. Lately, that has meant thinking about how to communicate these ideas to new faculty, to our students, and to our parents. In addition we struggled with developing a principle that communicated the ideas of educating makers and not just users. We ultimately felt as if that idea was just below the surface in many of these principles, but still aren’t sure how to make that idea come alive in just a phrase (especially for an audience unfamilier with Professor Harris’ ideas about constitutional citizenship).
I would love to hear your thoughts about our work and its applicability to your schools.
-Shayne