The TedxTalk included at the right does not come out of a school building.  Hot topics will often take a different view of one of the student achievement components and will hopefully promote some out of the box thinking.

In this talk, Sienna Wildfield discusses how parents can advance their children’s learning through community resources.  What is striking about this TedxTalk is the connection Wildfield makes to learning and the way you feel about the place in which you learn. 

It was hard for me to view and listen to Windfield’s remarks without thinking about school buildings and school districts.  Wildfield says that “feeling connected to where you live is a vital ingredient to the recipe in creating sustainable and resilient communities. If you feel connected to where you live, you are more likely to care about it, and want to protect it and want to participate.” Is this true of where you learn?

Other pertinent thoughts from this presentation:

How can we best utilize our communities to support the education of our children while also encouraging community participation?

How do you get people to feel connected, how do you get them to care? Let’s begin with our children.  What if we look long-term and consider the best ways to use our communities to educate, nurture and to grow citizens that care - simply by identifying the embedded learning opportunities that exist in every community.  This is community engagement at its finest.  What would it take to get this conversation started in your district?

Learning framed through where a child lives, strengthens his/her sense of place and creates a lens into the world the child has grown to care about because this is what she knows. And like the monarch caterpillar when children are nursed through their environment, their transformation into productive and caring adults becomes part of their lifecycle. What they learn through their community is their chrysalis - so as they grow up and they emerge and they spread those wings to fly, no matter where it is that they travel in the world, they will always feel connected to where they have learned and they will always have a place that they can call home.

The impact of these ideas on districts engaging in authentic community engagement as opposed to an institutional process or checklist is powerful.  What do you think?