Annabel: Our Reflections on an "Edge Maker"

Annabel at work on her drawing.

The dust has now settled; we are into the second week.  Our learners have been abuzz in establishing their own learning spaces, cementing new friendships and collaborative networks, and acquiring necessary equipment and materials.   With richly diverse interests ranging across art and happiness, architecture, psychology, film trailer production, memory, recycling, Japanese, artificial intelligence (AI), horror, genetics and science fiction, nanoscience, international music/Maracatu, automotive engineering, criminal justice and baking, American military, and forensic science, our students will engage many learning opportunities over the coming year.  Having met with every one of them, the Edge Team could not feel more excited, more honored, to share the next months with our sixteen "Edge Makers."

Let us begin, then, by focusing on one of these.  Enter Annabel, a student who in some ways embodies the reason why Kildonan conceived the program in the first place.

During a recent interview, Annabel described her past experiences of learning in traditional classroom settings as "terrifying."  Classes themselves were not the problem, she said, and Kildonan's teachers and students in particular offered regular support.  No, avoiding a blanket statement, Annabel insisted that classes did not work for her specifically.  While in a classroom, she went on to explain, she felt as if she were sinking into her chair and not collecting information.  She wanted something different.  She wanted something that could help her learn.

Rewind one year and enter the Personal Project.  As the culmination of 10th grade (as well as the capping project of the MYP curriculum), Kildonan students engage in a yearlong pursuit of their choosing for about three hours per week.  Annabel launched an intensive examination into the tropes of Nickelodeon's Avatar:  The Last Airbender.  While enmeshed in studying the natural elements and the show's narrative influences, she concluded that this was the kind of learning environment in which she needed to stay.  Pushing this thought further, she concluded that Edge, if it were anything like the Personal Project, would constitute the majority of her studies in the coming year.

Annabel's drawing:  pen, ink, tape, paper
Drawing fragments moving toward a cohesive image.  In progress...

Fast-forward to the present.  Across all three meetings we have had with her last week, Annabel speaks passionately about the work that lies ahead for her.  Now selectively engaged in educational settings other than the classroom, she discloses that she feels safe to learn for the first time.  No longer in possession of the same guidance provided by teachers, she feels unfettered and ready to innovate.  With conviction in her voice, she articulates her desire to solve problems for herself.  She speaks about the present - the next two years - as a crucial period during which she will test and develop the skills to respond to life's problems independently.  Indeed, she has begun this necessary work already by creating a notebook system to help her organize her thoughts and her work, a learning space according to those conditions that will best support her explorations, and artwork that is perhaps reflective of her evolution as a thinker and young woman.  In all, she evinces intense motivation as well as the follow-through to act upon her interests; her curiosity proves vast, and she possesses the capacity to formulate complex, meaningful questions.

Though her year's work will ultimately be concerned with her proclaimed interests (utopias, dystopias, chaos, apocalypses, post-apocalypses, DNA, RNA, bases, and genetics), the real work - not unlike the "project" that each student will undertake, actually - will be herself.  Our role as the Edge Team, then, is to help her on this journey, to acknowledge her voice and create the conditions in which she will succeed (or "tilt the landscape," per Gever Tulley (@gever)).

Annabel is only one of our sixteen "Edge Makers."  Sixteen students with stories of their own, intellectual passions waiting to bear fruit, and dreams to enact.  What a rigorous, moving year it will be...