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/

It may come across as trite, but if you want to know – if we want to know – what students are asking for, what they want and need, really, just ask them. I did just that when I sat down with Ben Russell and his students that make up Cave Studios at Carleton Place High School. After telling me all about making music, learning the technical approaches to recording from equipment to theory to application, songwriting, filming videos, and working within the music business as school, I asked Lukas and Sean, based on your learning experience in Music for Creativity – the course – what have you found that you wish was more a part of school?

Sean didn’t hesitate: “More creativity.” He went on to describe learning with actual objects – I take from his comment that in school we often replace real applications with simulations, the most reductive of which is the worksheet. In the studio context, we ask students to place hypothetical microphones in a hypothetical room to achieve the best hypothetical sound. Why do we do that? Why do we let the hypothetical stand for the authentic. Scarcity might be the response, but I don’t think that rationale works. There is an abundance of possibility for our classrooms and sometimes I think we lose sight of how important it is that we find a way, any way, to make those possibilities occur.

In the case of The Cave Studios, Ben Russell is leading from passion. Afterall, Ben is a musician. As you’ll hear, he chased the dream of making music for years. Now, he uses that experience and the inherent adolescent drive to make something indelible - as a catalyst for rock-n-roll: writing, performing, recording, videography, merch, promotion, if the music business has it, it is part of Ben’s Music for Creativity.

So, what’s the big question, then? How do you bring what has always been an underground, counterculture, garage formed, evolution through sweat equity process - into the walls of school? Ben has a theory that he describes that makes sense for all disciplines: there exists a menagerie of techniques and theories for making professional music. When students reach the ceiling of their experience and experimentation, Ben is waiting to add yet another layer. It’s the tried, tested, and truest form of learning, applied by artists and artisans for millennia: work to your capacity, and just when you think you’ve reached the peak, extend the journey with an additional question, skill, technique, or, even, a theory that until now will have meant little, and now means everything.

This is why for generations young people have made music and art: because it belongs to them, it is about them, and much of it is accessible without the expertise of adults. If we don’t know how, we’ll figure it out. If you’re a mentor, you’ll guide us while walking with us on the journey. We’ve got things you’ll need to learn also.

In the case of Music for Creativity at CPHS, the learning is about music and music production. It could be about anything. In fact, maybe it should be about everything, every subject, as a tool, as an object, waiting to be explored by minds that will shape it as the learn to use it, rather than store it for a purpose beyond knowing.

As Lukas explained, “I don’t really get it until I put it together myself. I would love to see experience like that in other classes, where I’m forced to go try it myself and see what happens.”

Before we get into the conversation, you’ve been listening to Lukas play Chopin’s Waltz in D minor. Later you’ll hear him play Billie Jean – yes, that Billie Jean. Sean’s Band Right comes in a little later on with their song, SASD.

The kids are alright!

Right Band: http://right.band/?i=1

Shop local.

Top of mind these last few months, and years before now when the zeitgeist encouraged “knowing your farmer” and eating within one hundred miles of your home, the idea has an appeal even in a world where so much of what we spend our money on comes from places we don’t know, made by people we don’t know.

I mean, what is local. Recently, in an act of admittedly passive activism I bought Canadian shoes. I’m not sure what Canadian means in this context: the shoes were made in China. Maybe designed in Canada? Whatever the explanation is, I was trying to “vote with my wallet” as the saying goes. But local? I’m not so sure.

The UCDSB has seen an inspiring and incredible spike in students who want to make things: not just sort of make them, but make them for a customer, that they design the thing for, with the intent of addressing a purpose and making meaning along the way. I don’t think this is a happy accident: I think young people have always sought ways to make an impression on a seemingly unlistening world in ways that only they can. The logical extension of a world full of content devoid of meaning, is that young people want to counter that trend: they want to counter the culture to introduce new possibilities.

In the case of Brockville Collegiate Institute, Shannon McKinnon’s students are countering a collection of cultures in one collective move: they are learning the craft, the art, of making clothes, in response to concerns about the environment and fast fashion, and poverty and the high cost of clothing that isn’t accessible and doesn’t last, and maybe, just maybe, in response to the notion that they represent the consumer generation. It strikes me that the young people I talk to everyday are not interested in being sold, so much so that they are quite happy to partake in the newly termed act of thrifting: where students purchase preloved fashion, tweak it, accessorize it, sew it, design it, and wear it, with pride.

When I was a teenager there was a time where brand awareness became a thing, such that I’m ashamed to say, it mattered where my mother bought my Levis, despite the nearing fate of bleach, tapering, cutting off the hem in expedited aging of the denim I so eagerly wanted to see as my style. Students at BCI might just employ similar ends to their designs for similar effect, but the denim will come from The Score in Brockville, ON, and what you see as a denim vest, or skirt, may well have begun its existence as a pair of jeans. These students take preloved fashion to the degree of blending fabrics and art and techniques in the creation of upcycled pieces, and some of them have only just learned to sew. When I visited The Score with the class, students spoke not of what they discovered on the racks, but what that find could be. And then? They went to school and made it. Vision to garment in 3 acts.

The Preloved Fasion Project at BCI has so many intents, so many impacts, so many connections for student learning in the community. My favourite of the long list is learning that helps a student realize that they can be a creator rather than a consumer; that brings to view that what we wear was made by someone, with their hands, and if that’s the case, well, we can make those things too. It is a lost art, but maybe not forever.

For students at BCI, it is an art of expression, activism, and experimentation displayed as fashion lines have always been shared: on a stage, to music, with flair and pomp and passion, maker as model, showing the world how they strut their stuff in clothes that they imagined, and then made.

Local, you ask? Canadian, you ask? These designers are just up the road, at your local high school. And that one-of-a-kind outfit you’re wondering at: you donated all the material to a local thrift store. The designer bought the clothes off the rack for .50 cents, and left a mark on the world.

What, indeed, will they do next?

This is the entire series in one episode, combining chapter 1 and 2 of the interviews done with the Principal, teachers and students from Russell High School.

Think of asking questions. How often in a day do we hear, “does anyone have any questions?”. The answer is so obviously “yes”, and yet the response if so often silence. Last week I walked the waterworks of a community development with students – we were following how the water in all its wonderful utility would travel from the town’s water tower to the homes and back to the water table. It was fascinating. I asked so many questions. A student wandered up to me at the end of the tour and said, “You ask a lot of questions.” I’m not sure that he knew if he meant it as a slight or not.

Here’s the thing about questions: it is weird to ask them because they come with the vulnerability of acknowledging fascinations and/or things you don’t know. Both vulnerabilities are publicly thought of as “weird”. Passion, fascination, imagination, joy, creativity, emotion, beautiful qualities – maybe the most beautiful – that we are taught, that’s right taught, to keep under wraps.

Which brings me to chapter 2 of our podcasts sharing the story of the Specialist Program at Russell High School. As Kathleen Rios explains, we need to embrace our weird as an example for our students that they can embrace their own version of weird. Because weird is where our identities thrive. What makes me and my contributions unique? The ways in which I am uniquely weird. It’s where I discover that “I” can do something, and the space where “I” share my ideas with the world.

This is the definition of the Specialist Program: a place to amplify your weird to serve the world beyond school with ideas only you can share. This is the difference between ordinary and extraordinary: the belief that bringing your whole, unfiltered self is not only of benefit to you, but the entire world and every human being that comes into contact with you. This is, as I understand it, Edward Clapp’s notion of the “biography of an idea”. Only you can add the ingredient to an idea that is the product of all of us in the way that you add it. Large or small, your unique piece is essential to the development of the idea itself.

And so the Specialist Program asks students, what do you want to learn, and what do you want to do with it. And then...? You learn it. And you do something with it. And you bring it to an audience. You make paper because you can, and in so doing you learn about the environment, and you plant trees in your community from the revenue you grow and the trees that you save. You collect materials and make sensory blankets because you can, and because the act of zipping and unzipping, buttoning and unbuttoning, and being in touch with different fabrics helps us know we are alive. And so, your learning – about quilting – becomes a lifeline to someone who needs to be warmed by connection. You take from your closet clothes that become catalysts for clothes that you make. It’s a contemporary return to a time when the clothes that you wore were made by someone you knew who made them: what began as a need for a shirt moved to a catalogue for a design, to a fabric for the design, to the shirt that you wore to school. These are all arts that are relevant, are alive, and in learning them we learn about who we are and who we can be.

There is something to the notion of “I am...” It is a step in the process of what Biesta calls becoming an “‘I’ in the world”. I am not a discipline or a subject. However, I carry disciplines with me as I navigate the world. It is here, in my individual weirdness, that I apply my disciplinary thinking in ways that only I can. In this quilt of conversation we talk with Kathleen Rios and hear from the students of Thrifty Ts about the becoming of a self.

I am.

We need to talk about purpose.

We need to talk about contribution.

We need to talk about meaning.

We need to talk about belonging to something larger than self, and feeling like what we do can change the world.

I met with a friend recently. In a lovely moment of positive-angst he asked, “Can I share my one-liner with you?” In a perfect example of the French phenomenon captured by the phrase L'esprit de l'escalier – he said, “Do you believe in science?” The point? If you do believe in science, then you need to know the science.

In the case of learning, especially in K-12 education, we can do better by our students by placing purpose, contribution, meaning, belonging to something larger than ourselves, and the belief that we can change the world at the centre of everything we do with children and students. The science says so.

Let’s look at a case study from Russell High School located outside Ottawa in Russell, Ontario. In this 7-12 school, part of the Upper Canada District School Board, students in grades 7 and 8 spend a part of each week working and learning in what is called a Specialist Program. An opportunity to turn their attention to their passions – discovered or as of yet in discovery – working with community experts to create, and think, and share. When I visited the school in March I met students designing video games, designing whole worlds for their creative writing projects, creating tie-dye t-shirts, and contributing to Thrifty Ts – an ecological social enterprise that seeks to help the community – in school and beyond – by repurposing, upcycling, thrifting, and recycling. Do you need paper products? Jacob and Paper Cutters recycle paper to create new paper products. Do you need custom fashion? Finch Clothing transforms old clothes into new designs. How about a solution to fast fashion? Zoe is a designer extraordinaire who sees in thrown-away sheets a fitted blouse for any occasion. And what of scrap material? Rose has the Quilting Project that takes leftover fabric, zippers, buttons, and turns them into sensory blankets.

So, what of purpose? The students at Russell HS lead social enterprises that create meaningful products, then direct revenue to local environmental initiatives, and charities – as learning.

And contribution? Student work is for their peers and their community beyond school. They look around and see what they make in the hands of people that live in their community. They know they are making a difference. They’ll tell you. Just listen.

Along the way, they belong to something, their learning belongs to something, larger than themselves. They say with the earnestness of youth, and the agency of global actors, that this is just a beginning. Afterall, these students are in grade 7 and 8. Empowered with skills that can take them anywhere, they believe they can do anything. The Specialist Program is a launch pad. What takes flight is possibility.

In the infinite wisdom of staircase wit, if you don’t believe in the science of purpose and contribution, meaning and belonging, and hope, you might just want to spend some time with the case study that is evolving at Russell High School, and the Specialist Program.

In this, the first of a series of podcast chapters, we speak to Dominique Bertrand, Principal of Russell High School, and hear from the teachers and students that imagine the Specialist Program into life. As you’ll hear, if you’re seeking a strategy for student engagement, you’ve found one right here.

In my desk drawer I have a key. It’s a replica antique key. Ornamental, meant to recall a time when things like keys were made not by machines, but crafted by hands; when ergonomics and efficiency were not on the radar, and so beauty and longevity rained; when a pocket was functional, and you were likely to find one weighted down by a key.

The key was a gift. The card that held it said that I was the key - in this case to supporting a project. The thing is: I was not the key. This group of grade 4 and 5 students had taken on an extraordinarily ambitious project: to persuade an audience to fall in love with trees, again. And not just any trees: “We need to plant...” they’ll tell you, “...THE RIGHT TREES.”

You’ll recall the Lorax: “I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees. I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.”

The Lorax is fiction. Students at Vanier Public School in Brockville, Ontario, are real. And they speak for the trees beyond poetry and rhyme. These 10- and 11-year-olds are empowered agents and citizens of their communities who have something to teach all of us about the power of persuasion. They’ll tell you that when the work feels like it might be done, well that just might be when you have to learn more and work more to bring your vision another small step forward.

They’ll tell you all about biodiversity, the Miyawaki Method of planting “tiny forests”, and the Dish with One Spoon treaty, an Anishinabek and Haudenosaunee teaching that explains that caring for our planet is about caring for ourselves too.

How did these students learn this? By working with the community, in the community, and by bringing the community into their classroom.

And what did they accomplish? In one school year they were able to make recommendations to the school board to diversify a list of approved trees, have two new trees from their recommendations planted in their yard, bring the school together in what promises to be a multi-year initiative to naturalize and diversify their school, all while working towards naturalizing 30% of the property by 2030 in line with the United Nations, and the Government of Canada.

Remember the key. Well, the card went on: “You hold the key to our future!”. Well, I disagree: students of Vanier, and all over this planet, we hold the key to the future, together.

“UNLESS someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.”

And with your leadership and hard work, I think you might just have the key to unlock our collective efforts to not only save the planet but leave it in better shape than it is right now.

At least, that’s the hope I’m attaching my agency to.