Edward E. Ford 2008 Educational Leadership Grants
Garrison Forest School, Owings Mills, MD
Garrison Forest School is establishing a Center for Public Purpose Partnerships to unify and support a comprehensive effort to prepare students to be issue-literate citizens, generative problem solvers, and action-oriented leaders. Four broad, inter-related, and flexible program components will comprise the key activities of the Center: Programs in Science, Engineering, and Public Health, in partnership with the Johns Hopkins University; Programs in Civic Literacy, Public Policy, and Service; Programs for Social Entrepreneurship; and Leadership Pathways for Community Engagement. Garrison Forest School will extend existing partnerships and cultivate new ones, including those with Johns Hopkins and other higher educational institutions; with the Student Sharing Coalition and other service and non-profit groups; and with other external organizations to provide students with opportunities that ready them for leadership in an interdependent, global society.
George School, Newtown, PA
Building on more than sixty years of experience engaging students and teachers in service around the world, George School’s new Global Service Program will offer training for both faculty and students and an intensive summer service experience for students. The first component of the program, a Service Learning Faculty Institute (SLFI), will bring independent school teachers from around the United States to George School to engage with community leaders from some of the countries with which George School and other Friends organizations have had service relationships for many years, to explore ways to develop truly collaborative global service projects. Participants in the SLFI will have an opportunity to continue as leaders in the student Summer Service Experience. That program will offer opportunities for a minimum of 36 independent school students to participate in an immersion program that will prepare them to do collaborative service in one of three locations, and then to spend three weeks in-country.
Germantown Friends School, Philadelphia, PA
Germantown Friends School will develop a Summer Leadership Academy for rising 9th grade students from local urban public and private schools. Through the study of water, the Academy will demonstrate that students and faculty can work across race and class barriers when engaged in a common educational enterprise. GFS will host the Academy, where students will examine water across three dimensions: environmental science, political/economic, and expressive arts. By tying their work to specific outcomes relating to social justice, students will be encouraged to use their talents and knowledge to educate and advocate for change. GFS and its public and private school partners, Breakthrough of Greater Philadelphia, Temple University and the Philadelphia Water Department will plan the program in the summer of 2009 and enroll students in the summer of 2010.
Hathaway Brown School, Shaker Heights, OH
For the past two decades, with the steadfast partnership of the E.E. Ford Foundation, Hathaway Brown School has sought to reinvent the high school experience so that it is less about the “alphabet soup” of APs, SATs, and GPAs, and more about preparing young adults to be visionaries and leaders, problem-solvers and change agents, poised, in the words of our mission statement, “to rise boldly to the challenges of their times.”
The result of our partnership is a whole new architecture for preparation, Hathaway Brown’s Institute for 21st Century Education.
The Institute is not a building or a wing of classrooms; it is a new way of thinking about what a school is and how learning can happen at the most transformative level. It is a structure that constantly and urgently pushes all of us at HB to be relevant and engaged. It encompasses a constellation of Centers and programs, all deeply connected to the core curriculum and all reaching well beyond the traditional academic disciplines. The Centers are designed to draw oxygen to the flame of a student’s flickering passion, engage the major issues of our era, and cultivate the competencies needed to get big things done in a world that doesn’t follow the rules of a classroom syllabus.
The Institute can be visualized as a solar system, with the core curriculum as the gravitational hub and the Centers as orbiting planets expanding the boundaries of possibility. The Institute enables students to focus on and experiment in such fields of inquiry as scientific research, global citizenship, service and leadership, environmental studies, and urban education. Some Centers have full time directors, and nearly all involve sophisticated collaboration with such institutions as NASA, the Cleveland Clinic, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Case Western Reserve University, and the World Educational Alliance. By enabling students to truly customize their secondary school education, the Institute democratizes excellence: the only requirements for participation are intellectual curiosity and a willingness to expend time and effort. One half of our $250,000 grant will be used to support three of the newer Centers in the Institute: The Worldwide Communications Center; The Center for Girls’ and Women’s Leadership; and The Center for Environmental Studies.
The balance of the grant ($125,000) will be used to create and host an E.E. Ford Foundation Summit for Educational Innovation where initiatives like the HB Institute would be showcased, and where teams of educators from independent schools around the country would gather to exchange transformative ideas and learn from one another. The Summit on Innovation would be, to the best of our knowledge, the first symposium exclusively devoted to the theme of innovation in independent schools, and its intimate size would enable faculty/administrative teams to gain easy personal access to transformative practices. Throughout its existence, the E.E. Ford Foundation has been the country’s leading “venture capital” source for original thinking in independent schools. The Summit would give the Foundation a powerful and rare way to encourage schools to create a culture of innovation and to spread excellent ideas more rapidly and economically throughout the independent school community.
The Lawrenceville School, Lawrenceville, NJ
As part of its recent curriculum redesign, The Lawrenceville School is redesigning its interdisciplinary studies program. Beginning with the Class of 2011, all Lawrenceville students will take two upper level interdisciplinary studies courses that draw upon two or more disciplines and lead to an integration of disciplinary insights. These courses will be culminating experiences for Lawrenceville students, preparing them well not only for college study but also for the complex challenges and global opportunities they will face as adults. Funds from the E.E. Ford Foundation will support course development, co-teaching, outside experts and summer workshops for faculty from Lawrenceville and other schools interested in interdisciplinary studies.
***
These five schools will be featured on the program at the national NAIS convention in Chicago in February 2009. The Executive Director of the Foundation will speak to the thinking behind this new initiative, while heads will address their specific programs funded by the Foundation.
