The “Why School?” Handbook
Students writing on the purpose and future of school.
The Idea
Over the last year I’ve enjoyed talking with a lot of high school students about their schools. One ongoing theme in our discussions is how little influence they have over their own education. Since I work trying to make school better, I know how many meetings adults are having to decide the future of schools, but these meetings almost never include the students. I started to wonder what students would think if they knew just how much we were talking about their future without them involved.
Often, when students are involved in their schools, it is not a very meaningful project. Things like student government rarely create good youth-adult partnerships. Even a lot of the “student voice” projects created to let students speak out on what they care about often turn into projects directed by adults. Currently, most Student Handbooks contain lists of what not to do, but do not have anything of interest to the actual student. I am excited to see what happens when students create the Student Handbook!
The idea is that The “Why School?” Handbook will be a tool for students to:
- Learn more about the important discussions on the future of their schools
- Ask questions about the purpose of their schools
- Run events or workshops that help other students get involved in the improvement of their own schools.
- Learn how to take ownership over their schools and their own education.
- Learn how their schools work and how to re-design their schools.
The Work
There will be four stages to our work together in creating this handbook:
- Study: Before we dive in to creating the handbook, we will do some short reading and have discussions on some of the big ideas behind the project.
- Design Process: We’ll do some research, spend a while coming up with a lot of great ideas, and focus in on the best concepts.
- Creation: After we have a lot of good ideas, we’ll put them together in our first draft of the handbook.
- Revisions and Publishing: After making sure every is perfect, we will publish the Handbook online and in print and share it with the world!
In doing this work, team members will get practice and help in doing graphic and print design, web development, and human-centered design; they will also learn a lot about the past, future, and purpose of education.
The Team
We will form a small crew of 5-7 high school students who will help lead the creation of this Handbook. Team members will be paid for their work through the Gittip crowd-funding platform and will create and sign a commitment to the project when we begin. The Sprout Fund has generously offered their support to hire students and pay for all of our supplies, food, and the printing costs of the Handbook.
Meetings
The team will meet once a week for the first 4 weeks (I’ll provide some great food!). We will start meeting during the week of March 10th (we will decide what day and time works best for the team once we know who is involved). After these first 4 meetings, we will meet just twice in April, twice in May, and once in June.
Join the Team!
If you want to join the project, write one paragraph describing why you want to participate. The deadline is February 28th, but the sooner the better! Once we get one team member, that team member will decide who else should join.
Send it to Tim Cook: tim@saxifrageschool.org
