“So, imagine we taught baseball the same way that we teach science currently. What we would do is we would have children read books about baseball rules. When they got to high school, we would let them reproduce famous baseball plays of the past, and it wouldn't be till graduate school that they would actually ever get to play the game. And that's pretty much the way that we teach science. It's not till graduate school that you actually ever get a chance to do science, as opposed to reading about science or reconstructing science. "

...there's no reason for that to be true. Children could be actually doing inquiry and doing experiments and doing science early on. And I think the same thing's true for things like writing, for example. Children learn about writing, but the way to write is to write with a good editor, to watch someone who's competent writing. I think our whole educational system could be oriented towards both exploration but also this kind of apprenticeship system much more effectively.”

“the way to write is to write with a good editor”, just like the way to learn to play sports, instruments, work with tools and technology, and learn just about anything requires playing as the act of learning with a good coach.

Allison Gopnik is a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of The Gardener and the Carpenter, a book that argues that children learn like lanterns cast light: broad, curious, and uninhibited allowing them to absorb vast amounts of information and see possibilities. Cultivating this innate wonder is the gardener's role in the learning experience.

So, imagine then a group of students who learn to write, with a good editor, bringing to the page what exists as a serial story delivered in the span of one hundred 6-minute podcasts. Imagine students listening to write, reading to write, writing to publish a four-volume graphic novel in collaboration with the authors of the podcast. Imagine the students as editors, invested in the making of a book for an audience. Imagine, if you will, young people writing just as humankind has always written. Student as author, artist, and editor. That is a garden ripe with possibility.

Graeme McTavish is a teacher at The Queen Elizabeth School in Perth, Ontario. He has a habit of diving in to really cool projects with students, balancing the need to engage with the essentials with the desire to make something with his students that amplifies the curriculum in ways that transform the learning into tangible products – like songs, books, knitted garments, and 3D printed solutions. Along the way his students build confidence and capacity in reading, writing and math, with a connection to how those skills show-up in the world beyond school.

As we continue to feature teachers and students in conversation all across the UCDSB, we turn our attention to what learning looks like. In the stories we share, listeners will encounter something familiar, something extraordinary, and inspiration to delve into project-based, experiential learning that centres students in the world, as contributors, creators, and catalysts for change.

In the case of Graeme’s grade 5 and 6 students at Queen Elizabeth, you can find their work in libraries and classrooms across North America.

CREDIT: Allison Gopnik quote from Hidden Brain podcast https://www.hiddenbrain.org/podcast/kinder-gardening/

The UCDSB’s We Were Here Project is a concept. It is also an evolution of a concept. Let me explain:

Over 20 years ago, Blake Seward discovered opportunity at the nexus of his personal and professional life as an educator. His fascination with history became personal and emerged in his family. He confronted the gap in a forgotten family tragedy, a scar left by the Great War. He asked, how did it come to pass that we forgot the service and sacrifice of our own blood? Later, standing at a Remembrance Day ceremony in his hometown, he recognized that same forgetting in a ceremony meant to commemorate the fallen. There was pomp and circumstance, poppies and the Last Post, and the roll call of names. Seward asked, who were these men? That question, wondering at the men behind the names, the lives that led and fell on the fields of France and Belgium so far away, so long ago, began a career defining shift to developing a learning experience that would place students at the centre of knowing the names, and following their footsteps through the careful reading of service files, the paper trails kept to document the lives of those who left the shores of Canada, many never to return, in an event we now call The First World War.

Then it was The Great War – named for its magnitude in how it shaped the world; the “War to End all Wars”. It didn’t succeed.

“Lest We Forget”, the project that Seward built with students, is an approach to learning history. Students interrogate primary evidence including service files, war diaries, period newspapers, letters, photographs, and construct a story of a life lived. We Were Here connects the approach to the communities in which the students live: names are taken off honour rolls in schools, cenotaphs in their towns and villages, and students follow the puzzle as it reveals itself. Students work with local historical societies and archives to further their understanding of the person they are researching to include pre-war life, family, vocations: as so many students remark, knowing the life beyond the war makes the connection profound and personal.

Mason Black is the catalyst for bringing the research project into the 21st century. Once students have constructed a story, they are encouraged to tell the story of a life in ways that make sense to them. Students contribute their research to a national data portal, develop apps to share their learning on a global stage, and incorporate contemporary storytelling and artistic mediums to share their learning beyond the walls of school. Following the student desire to take their research deeper, Black and Seward collaborated with the UCDSB to construct Mobile Archival Digital Labs (MAD Labs), state of the art archival technology that students use to digitize community archives as they learn the history of the communities they live in. An object, photograph, map or blueprint becomes the catalyst for wonder and storytelling.

Beginning in October 2024, the journey that begins in the towns and villages of Eastern Ontario, now reaches to Europe: students stand beside the headstones of soldiers they researched in postcard size cemeteries scattered all over France and Belgium and beyond. There, students speak of the life that led to the headstone. They read from stories they have written, poetry they have crafted, share art, artefacts, and the emotions that ultimately surface while trying to understand the events that led to this place – for themselves and the soldiers they are here to commemorate.

They were here.

We are here.

We Were Here.

“Here”, as in a place, a time, an event, a present, a past – as in people, standing on ground, in service of purpose. This is history.

We.

Were.

Here.

On a beautiful sunny day in June, June 15th 2024 to be exact, students at R. Tait McKenzie Public School attended the Rededication Ceremony at the Almonte Cenotaph where Private George B. Monterville’s name is now remembered.

Do they really understand the magnitude of what they did? Can we even understand that magnitude? Can you look back to the year you attended school as a grade 6 student? Did you correct a hundred year-old historic wrong as the learning you did that year?

More importantly, do they care? Do they care about this Nation’s, about Canada’s, history? There is no doubt. So, then, why do they care? They care because they learned about a life, a life that once walked the sidewalks of the town they live in – maybe even where Main St. West becomes Almonte St.; maybe even further down the road to Auld Kirk Cemetery visiting a friend or relative before he shipped off to Europe and the First World War. That life became a catalyst for learning about the past. A past that now lives in these students minds and hearts.

History is a living space: it is full of life, and when the human experience of the past is made central for those in the present learning the stories of those people, a connection is forged that does not diminish over time.

As you’ll hear, such connection with the people of the past is fundamental to purpose; what follows purpose like this shapes lives. And so, history, the past, shapes the present though story. In this case, a story of justice, for Private Monterville, a man who once was lost, and now is found; a story of the children of Almonte, Ontario who made it their duty to bring the past to the present for a fellow countryman and citizen who time forgot.

Student Video Story in English: https://youtu.be/piTC3kTxAJ4?si=G49W1bRskabhE1S-

Student Video Story in French: https://youtu.be/pY0SQP8pyn0?si=gVPh0Yf57oTeixS7

CBC Radio Interview: https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-100-ottawa-morning/clip/16074924-almonte-cenotaph-rededication

CTV News Feature: https://www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/article/forgotten-soldiers-name-added-to-almonte-ont-cenotaph-thanks-to-grade-6-class/