Caitlin Macklin, 9th Street Schoolhouse mentor and founder, recently visited the famed Free School in Albany, New York. In this guest post she shares some images and insights she gained there about building a democratic school community and culture over time.

“Wow. I’m really here. The place of my inspiration.”

This summer I made a pilgrimage to Albany, New York, to visit the Free School. This decades-old institution has long been a guiding light for me. It was my first introduction to the concepts of non-mandatory classes, democratic participation by students in conflict resolution and school governance, and putting children truly at the center of education.

As a new teacher (of four years) and a new school (into our third here at 9th Street), the thing that sank in most for me is the sense of being established that the Free School exudes. The feeling of rootedness settled in as I climbed up narrow stairways and stood on wood floors with lived-in scuff marks—I mean, even the disaster area of the summertime kitchen made my heart ache to have a SPACE to CREATE.

I currently teach out of my home on East 9th Street. This year, Laura Ruiz joined the Schoolhouse, and collaborating feels great! We intend to grow slowly but surely into a larger community of families more the size of the Free School, about sixty kids with a staff of five or six. During the visit to Albany, I was just soaking it in—in awe of what people have built together, just “making it up as [they] go along,” doing what makes sense, not what a bureaucrat tells them to do. Working with families, giving kids opportunities and mentoring, so they may discover and grow while staying whole, messy, in touch with their inner selves.

YouthFX program participants rehearse scenes for their summer narrative film project in the great room at the Albany Free School.

I have put so much thought into how to implement in my teaching and in the Schoolhouse structure the lessons AFS has learned that to see it and know it as a place with a particular community and history helped me understand their context and refocus my efforts in recognizing and building on what our community’s strengths are. Getting to ask Bhawin, a longtime teacher, some of my burning questions about the how of their lives together, talking with him about their process of becoming the school they are now, gave me an infusion of patience with our process.

Bhawin stepped out of the frame as we discussed the community-created Rules on the wall behind us.

I left feeling encouraged to give time to developing the particularities of our program, staying true to who we are as teachers, youth, parents—as people—and to respond from those real relationships to create better and better opportunities for living and learning together. Part of that is my commitment to making democratic, learner-centered education accessible to people in Austin who might not be able to afford it. In addition to an affordable tuition and part-trade options, I’ve also been working with the Education Transformation Alliance to collaborate on creating a scholarship fund.

Making meaningful education available to more folks in Austin is what our work with the ETA is guided by. And I think finding meaning is what this shift in education in Austin is all about: this is a growing movement of people who want more than cookie-cutter experiences for their kids and their lives. People in Austin are more than ever feeling acutely that the current system is just not fulfilling their dreams for their kids. We all want our youth to live lives that are prosperous and flourishing, and I want the young people in my program to identify and define that success for themselves within a strong web of community, where they are known and where they know what resources are available to them.

We are seeking meaning in our learning and in our relationships, and we are creating institutions that respond, that put down roots, that take time to get established, that work together. I invite you to find out more about the many alternatives available across the city on the ETA School Tour this Saturday, Oct. 20!

For further reading on the Albany Free School, pick up any of Chris Mercogliano’s works, watch Free to Learn by Bhawin Suchak and Jeff Root, and check out the school’s website or this blog post from an intern.

Caitlin Macklin

For the second in our series of guest posts, I asked Caitlin Macklin to explain the concept of place-based education as she and her students practice it at the 9th Street Schoolhouse. Feel free to ask Caitlin questions about this topic by posting a comment below.

Place-based education is all about connecting people with the land and each other. At the 9th Street Schoolhouse, I build curriculum around the tangible resources available in our particular place, instead of reading it—abstract—in a textbook. Learning that starts with the offerings of the real world connects students and families to their environment: natural, built, and social. Those connections strengthen ties to community and result in a deep-rooted sense of who you are. That in turn allows for a sense of satisfying purpose and fulfillment in life. Place-based education is about knowing, belonging, and having a positive impact on where you grow up, so that this relationship activates an ethic of care in adulthood.

The way to make learning stick is to bring it in through the body, all five senses alive and humming. The shape of the streets, the contours of the land, the secret spots to find raccoon tracks, the smells of cold winter air tinged with cedar smoke: it all becomes so much a part of you that in adulthood you make choices to preserve community and protect land; you think about your actions rippling out to the people and spaces you love deeply. Your values trump any ambition for profit at the expense of others and limit out-of-control growth. It’s exactly that sense of place that Wendell Berry describes—the place IS you: you eat it and breathe it, and if you pay attention to it you don’t need any experts to tell you what it needs in return.

Place-based education is . . .

. . . reading a geologic map to find out where the igneous rocks are in town, heading out to Pilot’s Knob to look for the old volcano, walking on the limestone at McKinney Falls that’s imprinted with the track of the lava flow, examining granite crystals in the big boulders that fell off the train on the way to build the state capitol.

. . . catching and holding a wiggly lizard, looking at its form and function, filling a dish with water and putting it in a protected spot under a rosemary bush, out of harm’s way.

. . . walking five blocks down to Boggy Creek, playing hide-and-seek and identifying poison ivy, tossing rocks and watching them splash through algae on the surface. Taking water samples and measuring, graphing, and computing the data you collect. Using hand lenses to look at macro-invertebrates and drawing conclusions about water quality. Asking questions about where the bottles and chunks of metal, tattered cloth, and food wrappers come from, and what happens when creeks get polluted; where does the water go, and where does it come from? Organizing a trash cleanup and inviting neighborhood groups and local agencies to help. Writing letters to city officials to ask for changes in laws and calling nearby businesses to encourage them to reduce waste.

. . . getting to know your neighbors, the parents in your school community, the local business owners: Who can help fix a faucet? Who makes the best pot of beans? Who’s been to China? Who served in the Vietnam War? Who can donate scrap paper, fabric, wood?

Place-based education is teaching children to ask meaningful questions—to observe their unique surroundings—to notice the structures that circumscribe their lives. It’s helping them seek answers, creating opportunities for them to present their knowledge to real people, and applying it to community life.

Caitlin Macklin