A learning environment that supports young people to thoughtfully engage with the world around them

Jump to: Our Learning Goals | Collaborative Curriculum |  Transformative Impacts

OUR LEARNING GOALS

Liberatory Education

Kite’s Nest is a center for liberatory education. But what does that mean? It means that we create educational environments that work to undo inequity and injustice. Our approach to teaching combines the tools of experiential education, critical inquiry, and healing-centered engagement. We support students to have relevant and transformative learning experiences, shape their own learning paths, and work towards collective liberation for all.

Imagination and Possibility

We work to make space for imagination and to expand the frame of what’s possible. Whether we’re supporting a broad range of gender expressions in our classroom, collaborating to build a cardboard city, or advocating for restorative justice in our county court system, we are holding space to question, to experiment, to unlearn, and to re-imagine.

Social & Emotional Learning

Our students foster the skills to feel and show empathy for others, to care for one another and themselves, to establish and maintain healthy relationships, to be able to work alone and in groups, to navigate conflict with non-violent communication skills and tools for resolution, to be self-aware and able to understand, manage, and communicate emotions.

Lifelong Learning

We are interested in how children learn, not just what they learn. More than the subject matter they learn in classes, we want them to know how to learn things in the future, as they develop new interests and encounter challenges. We foster curiosity, passion, initiative, and independence—the successful habits of lifelong learners. We teach students to explore, investigate, experiment, and reflect, with courage and compassion. When people have the skills to build knowledge, independently and with joy, they are empowered to pursue their own passions and positively impact their community.

COLLABORATIVE CURRICULUM

Learner Driven Curriculum

We believe that learning is most meaningful and durable when built on the interests and passions of the learner and that children can and should be agents in their own educational paths. As educators we listen closely to the sparks of engagement and curiosity happening around us, working to uncover the particular passions and joys of each student and of the group, and then we adapt the direction of our projects and learning goals in response. Our curricula is constantly evolving in this dynamic conversation between educators and youth, between the interacting interests and curiosities that make up a collaborative classroom community.

Environment as Teacher, Community as Classroom

We know that learning doesn’t only happen in the places we call “schools” or “classrooms,” but everywhere we go, and throughout our entire lives. We engage our city and surroundings as our classroom, and we encounter our neighbors and families as co-learners, teachers, and experts. Kids at Kite’s Nest interact with the real work of adults in their community, and have opportunities to share and exchange their own work with the world.

Sharing Our Work Through Expositions

Every class culminates in a public exposition, during which we share our work with a community of families, friends, and neighbors. Student exhibitions may take the form of a performance, a display of created works, an interactive activity, a meal, or a publication. In the lead up, students often make impressive leaps in understanding, productivity, and engagement. Still we are careful not to focus our classes on the end product, but instead the process of building towards a sharing moment, an opportunity to synthesize our learning and creations into something that can be witnessed or understood by the public.

TRANSFORMATIVE IMPACTS

Social Justice

How do we support kids to become agents of change in the world? To see themselves as a part of what can make the world a better place? Some of our classes (like the summer Social Justice Leadership Academy) are explicitly focused on questions of power. Yet all of our classes incorporate explorations of the structures and systems around us, and they create opportunities for us to think critically about our impact on the world. In our discussions and projects, we emphasize justice, fairness, and equity as they relate to the lives of our students. Young people have a keen sense of justice and are often interested in having conversations about big issues in the world (war, climate change, racism). We work to make space for these conversations to happen and support the dialogue that emerges. We are always working to address power and privilege within our own classroom and space, within our own organizations, and within our larger communities, and to cultivate a respect for diversity and culture.

Healing-Centered Teaching and Action

We are everyday witnesses to the ways in which society’s injustices and harms affect children and teenagers’ lives, minds, bodies, and opportunities. We know that learning is inherently connected to our emotional experiences and that a transformative educational environment must therefore also be a therapeutic one. We work to weave healing practices into all elements of our teaching and learning environments and cultivate a deeply loving and nurturing culture. We also know that the well-being of young people is connected to the amount of agency they have in their lives. We support young people to see their own individual experiences of struggle or of privilege as connected to larger historical and structural dynamics, and to identify the root causes of the violence and inequality they see in the world. We also support youth to step into community engagement and civic action, to transform their experience of hardship into a story of their power. Building community power brings youth a sense of belonging, purpose, agency, and possibility, and makes space for young people to dream their futures. 

Joy & Play

We believe that joy, pleasure, curiosity, physical expression, and fun are crucial and necessary components of a successful and meaningful learning environment! If the students are excited to have a dance party, we make time for that to happen. We honor play as a crucial way that kids learn to solve problems, get along with their peers, and become emotionally resilient. We believe that play, self-directed exploration, and story are legitimate forms of inquiry, and important ways that young people construct their own knowledge and understanding of the world.