Our school's Assumptions for teaching, learning, education, and schools

• There is a connectedness of all things.
• Learners achieve more with a learner centered sustainable environment.
• Schools are mission driven.
• Learning is contextual.
• Powerful learning focuses on relevant questions and contextual relationships between facts, concepts, relationships, and generalizations associated with those questions.
• Learning is framed by observations, facts, concepts, relationships, and universal principles that are bridges to big ideas and generalizations.
• Shared purposes energize a learning community.
• Common purposes are arrived at through communication of: clarifying assumptions, visioning a common mission, goal setting, deriving outcomes, and principled procedures which are developed and shared by a community of educators and learners.

Expected outcomes for our integrated school

Outcomes are expressed as observations and artifacts that can be seen by participants and visitors to our school. They will witness:

1. An integrated curriculum as " Life in all of its manifestations ." A community with a diversity of objects, people, other living and nonliving things and ideas which are used as the primary sources and resources for learners to wonder, question, experience, and participate in learning to achieve our seven goals.
2. A learning community that is a supportive, sensitive, responsive, and accepting learning environments that strives to enhance self-worth, creative intellectual endeavors, responsible behavior, and self-efficacy. A community where ownership, responsibility, and accountability are assumed to be synonymous with membership in the community.
3. A learning community that reflects the interests and capabilities of all students where each has much power over her learning environment as she is capable of handling.
4. A learning community with cooperation and synergy where everyone is both a learner and a resource for everyone else. With goals set and outcomes achieved that challenge the intuition, creativity, imagination, knowledge, and skills of the members, including the instructors.
5. A learning community which extends beyond the walls of the classroom.
6. A community with participants who are involved intellectually and emotionally in learning experiences with little or no fear and anxiety.
7. A community where decisions are consistent, ethical, and responsive to the needs of all members and the community and its sustainability.
8. Assessment as learning experiences which is regular, unbiased, consistent, appropriate, and communicated through a variety of feedback loops.
9. Achievement of the school's seven goals through its four contextual areas.
10. Diverse groups of heterogeneous individual students, who are randomly assigned to a classroom resulting in a genuine dependable learning community.

Contextual areas and ideas for an integrated curriculum

An integrated curriculum needs a context for ideas or content information to teach. In a traditional curriculum these ideas come from the subject areas. Ours come from the follow four context categories:

Four contextual areas with concepts and relationships:

1. Global : Our experiences and relationships with the world: physical reality, the biosphere, and the global ecological systems. This context emphasizes a global perspective with: interdependence, sustainability and recognition of limits, diversity, partnership, competition, cooperation, change, cycles, and energy flow. Emphasis is on the organic nature of planet Earth and all its physical, cultural, and knowledge systems.

• Interdependence : a relationship in which the success of the whole depends upon the success of each individual member, just as the success of each member depends upon the success of the whole.
• Sustainability and recognitions of limits : every organism is part of a system and requires a resource base to provide the raw materials upon which the system and it's members depend for survival. This resource base is limited with respects to Earth. The long-term sustainability (survival) of any system depends on its ability to live within the limits of its system.
• Diversity : in general greater diversity results in greater stability. An oak forest with its rich diversity of life is far more stable than a mono-culture like a cornfield. The diversity of ethnic cultural backgrounds is one of the strengths of our nation. In all human organizations, diversity is necessary to maintain stability. Especially important in an age of narrow specialization.
• Partnership : too much competition leads to burnout, self-destruction, monopolies, controlling cultures of winners and losers. Too much cooperation leads to passivity, inertia, apathy, and cultures of over reliance on governmental agencies. There is a powerful bias in our country toward unrestrained competition in human economies (social Darwinism). There is no such thing as unrestrained competition in nature, and no one believes in unrestrained economic, banking, and political competition. In natural systems, competition within species is always constrained by cooperative strategies such as territoriality and dominance hierarchy. Competition between species is controlled by factors such as adaptive modifications, which often result in two similar species utilizing entirely different food sources. In cultural systems, the most vocal defenders of unrestrained economic competition are often the first to exploit political means to protect them self from the very competition that they defend. It is through ethical and productive partnerships that a sort of balance can be sustained to reduce oppression and increase the well-being of many for their pursuit of happiness.
• Change : occurs as matter, organisms, systems, and groups evolve through an interplay of creation, entropy, homeostasis, and mutual adaptation.
• Cycles : fluctuate as feedback loops provide various levels of tolerance in the dynamic interplay between stability and instability. Seasons, life cycles, economic cycles, atoms, molecules, matter, planetary ecological systems, living organisms, flow of money... Just as urinalysis provides information/feedback about the health of the human body, the quality of our planetary water supply provides information/feedback about the health of our ecological system. Other cycles: the relationship between public purposes and private interests. Supply and demand, Human rest cycles to growth cycles. ...
• Energy Flow When physical objects and systems with different energy states interact there is a transfer of energy flowing from a source to a receiver. Living systems are dependent upon an external energy source for survival. Cultural systems depend on resources and information as external forms of energy. Money, knowledge, and data are forms of energy transferred into information by the human mind. Just as the health of natural systems depends on a free flow of solar energy throughout the system, the health of a cultural system requires a free flow of information. System imbalance occurs whenever there is a glut of energy/information in one part of a system at the expense of the rest of the system. When the imbalance becomes too great a systemic catastrophe results.

2. Relationships : People have relationships with others and themselves. Relationships are subjective and participatory with respect to the nature of human knowledge and experience. We must constantly be aware of our responsibilities to make principled and ethical decisions as individuals which affect ourselves and our community as well as decision made collectively within different communities.

3. Time : Our place in time relative to the past, present, and future. How our relationship to time has changed, is changing, and will change. Seeing time as a continuous and constant process that progressively changes as it incorporates a historical perspective with a present perspective, and expands into a future perspective; which impacts our understanding, critical thinking, and decision making processes.

4. Symbolic : Our relationship to the world of information and knowledge. We recognize ideas, symbols, relationships, and metaphors as human creations and as such the significance that different perspectives can have in shaping our thoughts and actions. Constantly reminding ourselves that the same information can mean different things to different people. In the symbolic context we emphasize: observations, facts, concepts, relationships, generalizations, and connectedness as resources in a systematic approach to selecting, organizing, and processing information with critical thinking and higher-order skills to answer questions and solve problems with a focus on the quality of information rather than the quantity.

The four contextual areas: 1. global, 2. relationships, 3. time, and 4. symbolic become the contexts in which learning is organized, planned, implemented, and assessed relative to our educational goals and outcomes.

Note - traditional subjects or disciplines have been used to break down information and classify it into related areas (mathematics, science, literature, history, geography, art, music, ...). While there is nothing wrong with this approach it doesn't connect information in real life ways. However, this information is not omitted, but most likely included as symbolic information in the traditional sense. However, it may also be included among the other contextual areas: global, relationship, and time.

Summary of contextual areas in a table format

Contextual Areas →	Global	Relationship	Time	Symbolic
Contextual Areas subcategories →	Interdependence Sustainability Diversity Partnership Change Cycles Energy flows	Individual and group relationships Individual views and responsible decisions and actions Collective community actions and decisions	Past, present, and future orientation Consider changes through time for understanding, critical thinking, and decision making	Information and knowledge is arranged by humans resulting in the same information while often meaning different things to different people Critical thinking with systematic approach using observations, ... for understanding and decision making based on quality.

 

In curriculums organized around subjects (mathematics, science, literature, art, music ...) it is the subjects that are used as contextual areas for study. In our integrated curriculum these four contextual areas will be used to organize learning and teaching. To illustrate this difference the following table has sample questions for each of the four contextual areas that may be asked when seeking and using information to achieve the seven goals of the school.

Later, examples will be shown how the four context areas are merged with the seven goals to plan units or sequences of study. First, a table is presented with examples of questions whose answers will provide information and understanding related to the contextual areas.

Sample focus Questions for Big Ideas to Use as Themes of Study

To merge the context areas with our goals a focus question for a big idea is helpful to plan units of study for students. Possible focus questions for big ideas to explore:

• What are the benefits of water on earth?
• What are the values of numbers and number systems?
• How does the human body work?
• What is an average 12 year old?
• What value does science have in today’s world?
• How will genetic engineering affect human life in the future?
• How has the natural landscape shaped American history?
• What makes a culture civilized?
• What makes a culture modern?
• What do the various disciplines tell us about war?
• What is energy?
• What is matter?
• What is motion?
• What is in the sky?
• What is earth?
• What is our relationship to the Earth?
• How do cities deal with waste?
• To what extent has government intervention been effective in solving inequities?
• To what extent has the free market been effective in solving inequalities?
• Information breaks down assumptions arguments are built on.
• How do the decisions individuals make impact societal structures?
• How are individual decisions affected by societal structures?
• Describe how racism and racial discrimination are world problems.
• Those who are not prepared for a globalized multiracial world will be the ones who suffer the most.
• What was the role of slave labor in building the U. S. See 22 objectives
• How did reconstruction affect the U. S. after the Cicil War? And even beyond ... Great migration, Harlem Renaissance …