Do You Recognize This Photo?
Do you recognize The New School building from this angle? Looking East with a wide view of our new courtyard? We’ve been amazed by the way changing our frame of reference can create shifts in our perspective.
Whether students are seeing the city for the first time through the lens of recent immigrants or trying to understand the shifting narrative of Oakland Cemetery, we’re working hard to stay limber in our thinking and curiosity.
Each week Peter Lefkowicz, the TNS Head of School, sends out the Weekly Update so parents can catch up with their students’ world. Here’s a recent excerpt:
Community-Engaged Learning
The Atlanta Project: Telling Atlanta’s Stories started with a tour of Oakland Cemetery, where our guide focused on how the Cemetery’s narrative has shifted over time. Then on Thursday we took a trip to The Atlanta History Center to explore how they use visual and audio media as well as historical artifacts to create historical narratives. The group focused on our Atlanta Project: Climate Change visited the Trees Atlanta Treehouse and took a tour of the Beltline while talking about tree conservation and tree identification. As a group, we have been working on a presentation that includes our survey results of TNS students (and their opinions/knowledge about climate change). Students will complete a carbon footprint calculator that estimates their carbon usage for an entire year. In the ATL Project: Food and Music, students crunched data from the surveys they administered last week and began drafting a visual for that data, in addition to visiting the Atlanta History Center on Thursday to begin pieces together how the history of Atlanta has shaped the food and music industries we know today. In Entrepreneurship, students presented on their experience during the “$5 Challenge” where students had an afternoon to generate as much money or social value from their $5. One lesson was that the $5 didn’t make a difference and that the students already have skills and resources at their disposal to create a lot of value already! On Thursday we began our journey into “customer discovery” with an inspirational trip to Chick fil-A’s enterprise innovation center – The Hatch. We learned that their innovation process (Understand, Imagine, Prototype, Validate and Launch), is incredibly similar to the process our students go through, and learned the benefit of re-framing failure as “unexpected outcomes!”
In other words, besides doing challenging academic work in every subject, TNS students are in the city doing original research.
Want to learn more about Community Engaged Learning? Check out his recent blog post?
Want to hear more from TNS students? Sign up for our Information Session at Horizon Theatre on October 22nd.
We can’t wait to meet you!
Peter Lefkowicz
Peter Lefkowicz is the founding Head of School at The New School and has served in that role since 2014. Over the last 25 years, he has taught English and History at both the high school and university levels and is passionate about creating rich learning experiences both in and outside of the classroom. Peter has a B.A. from the University of Virginia, an M.A. in English from Hollins College and a J.D. from the University of Virginia.
