Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 3 | Civic Education in Schools The Right Time is Now, page 3 (low bandwidth)

Gentle Beginnings
The kindergarten classes in Hudson, Massachusetts, begin each day with a community meeting. As the “star” for a day late in April, Emma Nathan took attendance, asked how many of her classmates wanted milk and began passing a koosh ball, which has soft rubber spikes that give it a noticeable resemblance to a small, round porcupine. As the ball was tossed, each child greeted a classmate, making eye contact with the other child and saying “Good morning, Tim” and “Good morning, Amanda,” until everyone had been included. Learning these simple and important social skills is part of a commitment in the Hudson schools to help youngsters learn to build a community and to express mutual respect for each other. These skills are the underpinning of a rich civic engagement that the children also begin to experience in kindergarten and continue throughout their school years.

As the morning progressed in Catherine Waugh’s kindergarten class, the children took pride in putting the final touches on a quilt project that they had been working on for some time. With the help of Emma’s mother, the youngsters carefully added “tying-off” knots to their quilt, which was made as a gift for a mother and child living in a Hudson homeless shelter. Each year every kindergartner designs and makes one square of their classroom quilt. Teachers encourage the children to express in their quilts something they would like to share about themselves with a less fortunate child. When the quilt is assembled, each child takes home the quilt and a journal, so that they and their parents can write a note in the journal about the project. When the journal is completed, the class presents the quilt to a mother and her child or to the director of the shelter. The journal shows how much the students care and how much they have learned in this hands-on civic education lesson. “I’m glad I helped someone keep warm,” wrote one child. Another expressed the thought that “This makes me want to help more people.”

Kindergarten lessons of social responsibility are reinforced throughout the school year. For example, when the students learn about the letter “K,” each time a youngster performs an act of “K”indness, a heart is added to a classroom poster proclaiming “100 Acts of Kindness.” Later in the year and further along in the alphabet, other kindergartners performed 100 Acts of “R”esponsibility,” such as pushing a chair under a table or throwing away scrap paper.

And so civic education begins in the Hudson school district (www.hudson.k12.ma.us). In a gentle way, students begin to gain social skills and to understand the connection their little classroom community has with the greater community in Hudson, which is an industrial town about 30 miles west of Boston.

A K-12 Emphasis
Lessons learned in the early school years echo again and again in middle school and throughout the high school years, helping Hudson students become empathetic, respectful citizens with a desire to be of service to their community.

Speaking of the importance of Hudson’s comprehensive civic engagement curriculum, Charles Haynes of the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center says, “Our view is that elementary schools are key because civic habits of the heart begin at a very early age.”
There are nearly 2,800 students in the Hudson school district. One-third of the student population is Portuguese-speaking; many emigrated from Brazil. Twelve percent of the students receive free lunches, yet despite their lower socioeconomic level, residents of Hudson recently ratified a $43 million budget to build a new high school slated to open in the fall of 2003. The school’s architectural design features open spaces to accommodate “cluster” groups, communities within the school that will form the basis for democratizing the school and enhancing the student voice in determining day-to-day policies.

Teachers are eager to share what is happening in their Hudson classrooms. Patty Lima’s second grade in the J.L. Mulready School read The Mitten Tree by Candace Christiansen (Fulcrum Publishing, 1997) and then worked on “Helping Hands Stay Warm,” a project that encouraged students to do chores for their families to earn money for children’s mittens and gloves that were donated to the Hudson Food Pantry. While studying adjectives, the children collected boxes of cereal, studied the advertising to find adjectives and then donated the cereal to the food pantry. Among other projects, Laura Mullen’s second graders collected pledges from sponsors who contributed a small sum for each book a child read; the class raised more than $400 to buy a water buffalo, chickens and a pig for a family in another country.

Mullen echoed the words of other teachers in the district, saying, “Community Service-Learning is one of the things I really have a passion for because it is so important for
our children.”

Everywhere in Hudson, teachers and students together seem to have found inventive ways to develop lessons of civic education while improving academic accomplishments. SAT scores, attendance rates and enrollment in advanced placement classes have increased, while elementary class size has decreased to about 19 students in each class.

At the high school, a group of six students traveled to the Patanal wetlands in Brazil where they learned environmental research skills and conducted baseline research about the wildlife in the area. The trip, which was conducted in partnership with Earth Watch, taught the teens how to conduct an animal and plant census, how to analyze predator-prey relationships and how to begin preserving the wetlands. Students kept a daily journal and took turns sending reports back to their Hudson web site. The students were the second group to travel to South America, and the skills they learned are being put to use by the environmental class. Teacher Frank Gilliatt has been working with students for five years to develop a trail along the Assabet River, which runs behind the high school and used to be inaccessible. “As soon as the students get their hands dirty, they feel a partial ownership of the trail and are incredibly protective of it,” Gilliatt says.

Next page: The mission of César Chávez High School is “to develop young people who will make the country a better place by influencing the public policies that affect their communities.”

Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4