September 2, 2022
Society programs us early on:
Learning is about work
&
Wishes are the stuff of fantasy
Existing merely as an e s c a p e from reality
Not necessarily
The
building
blocks for school.
In LABS, a collaborative course that combines IB Language & Literature and IB Cultural Anthropology, Sean Martin and Linda Carmichael turn societal programming upside down.
This is the first year for LABS, and Martin and Carmichael initiated the school year by inviting students to share “someday wishes,” an idea spawned from the article “Letting Student Voice Lead the Way,” in ASCD. In the article, students at a rural school in Maine are invited to dream about what they would like to do at school…someday. Then, at some point throughout the year, each student is given a day designated as their “someday,” and learning for all students is shaped by that other person’s hopes and dreams. Not only does this approach produce joy for the wisher, it offers members of the school community the chance to practice empathy, engaging as a co-collaborator in a day devoted to someone else.
The article focused on young children, so it was particularly interesting to observe the way Martin and Carmichael adapted the concept to suit an advanced high school course. As students shared nostalgically about wishes to revisit the joy they felt as young children in elementary school, or about dreams they had for a kinder world, Martin and Carmichael listened intently.
“I would like to find a way to make subjects super fun and it would be awesome to build relationships and bonding and excitement.”
“I would like to go outside.”
“I want a fun day in classes—incorporated into our learning.”
“Someday, I want to be in a class where the course is more based on what the students are interested in learning than what the state says they should learn.”
With the exception of wishes too vague to take action, like the wish to “know exactly what I want to do in the future,” or the wish to “change the way people look at themselves and others,” most were fairly simple wishes that Martin and Carmichael could schedule throughout the year, and they could do it in a way that could be achieved alongside the learning.
But driven to go deeper than that—driven to explore meaningful ways to empower student voice—Martin and Carmichael entertained a different question:
What if instead of tokenizing student wishes—making them come true on a single stand-a-lone day—we use wishes as the impetus, the entry point, for learning?
What might happen if instead of connecting student wishes to learning, we accessed learning through wishes?
Would this be the needle in a haystack that truly would, as the ASCD article suggested, “increase healing and well-being in school?”
These questions drove a session of brainstorming between the three of us, where we considered a number of approaches and a number of ideas. The key to it all was connections. It was about moving beyond concrete units, ordered in traditional ways, and instead, considering how student interests might intersect with course goals.
The shift was nuanced, but the result was powerful.