POSTED ON BEHALF OF KI’TAY DAVIDSON

Content

Link: http://knowledgecommonsdc.org/

Knowledge Commons DC is a “free school for thinkers, doers, and tinkerers – taught anywhere, by anyone, for everyone.” Essentially, each season, this organization will coordinate and reach out to community members to create their own lesson plans and lead a class on any subject matter. From there, anyone in the community can take the class. Overall,  Knowledge Commons acts as an arbitrator to facilitate and set the dates for each of these classes.

In application to students, I would offer creating, teaching and leading a class through Knowledge Commons DC  to any student in the class as extra credit. Hopefully, students would channel their passions and new found academic knowledge into leading an empowering session on the issues they experience and care about. Examples could be, “ Education Reform: a Student’s Perspective on Improving our Schools” or even teaching about a civil rights movement. Overall, leading and creating a lesson plan will give each student the ability to be their own agent, become a teacher (disrupting the banking method of education) and incentive and focus on the importance of civic engagement.

Context

This extracurricular event and project is most appropriate for either  high school or college level students in both a formal or informal atmospheres. This is due to the necessary educational development and skill that is crucial to developing and leading a lesson plan. In respect to the atmosphere, the subject matter and audience is dependent on the student’s interest and focus, and therefore, will alter depending on student’s chosen topic to lead a lesson on.

Objective and Goals

This project will give students the ability to focus on community building and engaging in multiple intelligences.  The student becomes the teacher in this project and will begin to actualize how their education can be applied to their own lives and experiences. As a result, various intelligences are employed as they are both developing and leading the project. Secondly, community building becomes an inherent goal in administering the project due to the nature of wanting to have an engaged audience and clear outcomes for each participant. Thus, each student is  driven to learn and develop an understanding of how to facilitate educational and empowering atmospheres that includes various types of individuals.