Abstract
A Democratic Learning Environment is one that has been universally designed for and with those who have membership within it. A Democratic Learning Environment ensures that the authentic voices of both student and adult learners (staff, faculty and community) are at its center.
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Back in September 1994, I had felony gun charges, had been expelled from three prior schools and had every intention to drop-out as soon as I turned sixteen. I was a brown boy who believed that school was not for me, the secret child of a prominent Roman Catholic Priest and the only child of an immigrant bi-polar schizophrenic mother. Neither I nor my issues were addressed, seen, or heard in school. In fact, the culture and climate of most schools I had attended communicated that they were not designed for individuals such as myself. They were designed for middle-class white students. I was tolerated but only if compliant and willing to exchange my sense of self, identity and culture by assimilation. If not, then my punishment would be to be labeled as a troubled youth, thereby becoming a manifestation of the often racist and classist narratives that were associated with learners like me, who did not reflect dominant culture or privilege.
Fenway High in Boston: A Democratic School
In 1994, I found a democratic school—Fenway High in Boston, which changed my perception of school. My experiences at Fenway High were life changing as I encountered through first-hand experience the benefits of democratic schools. Fenway was a student-centered institution, where young people were encouraged to express themselves creatively; engage in interdisciplinary thinking; be active, engaged citizens; and prepare for college. Where representation mattered, the faculty reflected the community and student body, and the content was always taught with overt and obvious connections to what was relevant to students in their lives outside of school. That experience was transformative for me, because it was the first time that I saw the connection between educational experiences and life outside of school. Or that education was supposed to be done with you and for you as opposed to being done to you. At Fenway I learned that the true purpose of education was to equip you with tools and skills that empower you to be able to make sense of and navigate the world outside of school. This was consistently reinforced through their culture of keeping the authentic voices of both student and adult learners (staff, faculty and community) at its center. These experiences sent me on a journey from the streets to becoming an educator, who’s been committed to recreating the types of learning environments that changed my life. My greatest hope is that through this work, we will be able to help our society re-envision what school could and should be. That all students—despite their background, status, or how they choose to identify—can authentically access relevant and challenging learning experiences and develop into the leaders that our world and society so desperately needs.
Putnam Avenue Upper School
Vision
After experiencing the power of democratic school as a student at Fenway High, I was compelled to continue this work as a classroom teacher, youth advocate and eventually as a school leader. This work was central to the launching of Putnam Avenue Upper School in Cambridge, MA. I founded the school in September 2012. We developed the school, from the ground up, to be a democratic space, centered on Equity, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), Community Partnership & Student Voice. We honored being a democratic school by intentionally keeping the authentic voices of both student and adult learners (staff, faculty and community) at the center of our work and decision making. For example, our core values were democratically chosen. They were passion, pride, ownership, balance and perseverance. Our vision was simply to ensure that all of our students are on trajectory to the good life, that being the best possible quality of life in adulthood, as defined by our young people. This school’s work in equity and democratic process has led to it being highlighted both locally and nationally, including being one of three schools which were designated as exemplars of equity in action by the Massachusetts Department of Secondary and Elementary Education.Footnote 1
From the Ground Up: Challenges and Solutions
I led that school community for nine years. When hired as the founding head for Putnam Avenue Upper School, my goal was to create a democratic school community that kept the authentic voices of both student and adult learners (staff, faculty and community) at its center. However, I was faced with the following challenge: the school population was middle school students who were funneled in from three diverse K-8 Schools that would no longer be serving middle schoolers as a result of the opening of this new school. Not only would students be coming but also faculty and staff who have never worked with each other before and represented very different school communities, values and norms. Each of us, including myself, brought with us the baggage of our prior experiences with school and a variety of different expectations based on those experiences, along with fear, trauma and anxiety.
I quickly discovered that lack of trust affected the foundational strength of our community. How would we create a sense of trust among individuals who were coming together not by choice, but because of this new structure, along with a sprinkling of new individuals who did not know the community and a leader who was young and not known by any? At that point, we weren’t a school and certainly were not a community simply because we would put together with each other. We needed a sense of purpose and identity around what it meant to be together. We needed this to give ourselves and each other permission to disassociate from our previous experiences with school because this school would be different. By starting with a sense of purpose and identity that would come from the voices of its constituents, this school would be unique. I knew this from my experiences as a young person at Fenway and was thankful to have that experience to rely upon as an exemplar of what this work should look and feel like.
A powerful lesson from Fenway High was to always start with the end in mind. This meant starting with a clear and focused vision. This process would serve the purpose of creating a collaborative sense of purpose, which would become the bedrock of our school culture through a democratic process that would begin to normalize the usage of faculty, staff, student, caregiver and community a voice.
We began to work on the vision statement at our first faculty meeting where I shared about the notion of core values and having an agreed upon set of principles that would guide our school community. I then presented the following words as examples of values that resonated with me. I wanted the faculty to react to these terms and provide feedback on and/or suggest others. These were the terms: Passion, Pride, Ownership, Balance, Perseverance. I did not expect the words to resonate with the team. In fact I had assumed that we would be considering the terms for quite some time, but I was wrong. We utilized protocols from the school reform initiative (School Reform Initiative Protocols, n.d.)Footnote 2 to discuss our thoughts and reaction. Quickly, we came to consensus that these terms were the values we desired to frame our school through a democratic process which both acknowledged and included the voices of all.
Framing Our School
What resonated with the founding faculty about the terms were their application in the world outside of school and that they did not sound like educational jargon. We next shared these terms with students and caregivers who also responded positively. Then as a school community, we spent a year and a half exploring how we would come to a consensus to give these terms specific meanings that reflected how we would use them to support and guide our work. The process of calibrating was not easy, but was very necessary. The words of the core values resonated with all of us, and we felt pride in knowing that we as a community had decided upon them. Yet at the same time, we each interpreted them differently and expected each other to interpret them through our own unique lens. This showed us that although we had democratically chosen these terms, we would have to dig deeper into the realm of listening to each other as we negotiated the definitions. We also had to keep using the terms in our context (our school community) so that we would stay on the same page. Thus, our democratic process meant hours of listening sessions and revisions until we landed on what’s below. This is an example of a democratic process because this vision and these values represent the thinking of all constituents of the school community. All constituent groups were involved in the process, and the commitment was to continue the process until through consensus. All constituents were satisfied with the end result:
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VISION: At the Putnam Avenue Upper School, we believe that all of our students can and will be successful in and out of school and beyond, no matter what their circumstances are. We believe that our students are headed toward the “Good Life.” That is, we believe that our students will become successful and contributing members of society with the best possible quality of life. In order to live the “Good Life,” students will develop a sense of mastery of our core values of passion, pride, and ownership with balance and perseverance.
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PASSION: It is passion that drives our community toward excellence. More specifically, our passion is for the pursuit of academic excellence through effort and the pursuit of social justice through recognizing the different experiences that come with race, class, gender, sexual identity, ability, and religion. We believe it is our responsibility to use our knowledge to better the world we live in.
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PRIDE: We take pride in our identities and the impact we have on both individuals and the larger society. We think not only about the here and now but about the future as well, considering carefully how each choice we make will impact the future of our own lives as individuals and the future of our collective community.
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OWNERSHIP: A great school relies on a strong sense of ownership, and we demonstrate ownership through reflection and planning. By committing to goals, developing clear plans for achieving those goals, and regularly reflecting on the progress we have made toward reaching our goals, we are accountable to ourselves and to our community.
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BALANCE: We believe that being well-rounded is essential to our overall success and quality of life. In addition to academic pursuits, we seek balance through participating in activities outside of school. We celebrate our academic and extracurricular interests and know that our school culture will be balanced and healthy only if it is made up of balanced and healthy individuals.
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PERSEVERANCE: We recognize that our relentless quest for excellence is full of obstacles and conflict. We turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones and demonstrate perseverance by identifying challenges and striving to overcome them. We choose not to see obstacles as moments of defeat but as moments to grow and make ourselves stronger.
Strengthening Lifelong Democratic Schooling
In all of our processes, we were intentionally democratic: grounded in the notion of collective voice. This proved to be the cornerstone of the school community’s health and eventual success. Having the courage to embrace vulnerability and dive deeper into reinforcing the deployment of rituals, routines, systems and structures that honored and centered around collective voice was at the apex of all positive institutional growth and development.
For example, when we encountered the typical crisis of clashes between students and educators, toxic culture, high discipline referrals, suspensions and low high stakes test achievement scores, we turned to vulnerability and collective voice first by engaging in a public survey process, which asked students and faculty the same questions about their perceptions and experiences of the school. The most powerful survey came from a question that asked if students were treated with respect and dignity and were they well cared for and well known to school staff. The staff overwhelmingly (80%) responded yes, that they work hard to communicate care and were available both before and after school and many wished they had attended schools like ours. The students on the other had an overwhelming 80% consistent response in stating that they did not feel safe, well known or cared for. This was shocking and painful for faculty and myself to grapple with and, at the same time, remarkably powerful. It reinforced the fact that even if we believed that we initially designed a democratic school that would center around the voice of our students, we needed their voices on a regular basis to ensure that we were not missing the mark. We needed to normalize seeking and utilizing student voice so that the impact of our work was in line with our intent.
That experience led us to investigate restorative practice (Novak Education, 2022), which are practices that restore agency through listening and acknowledge the voice and experiences of others. We did this not just for the sake of having an alternative to traditional disciplinary practices, but to layer the facilitation of the development of a culture of proactive and positive intentional power sharing, listening and constituent agency. If we were to be democratic, we needed feedback regularly about everything from day-to-day classes to large aspects of what we were trying to accomplish. Listening did not mean agreeing; it meant developing understanding of each other’s perspectives, perceptions and experiences so that we could proactively take each other into consideration as best we could, by honoring Anderson’s conditions of nurture (Anderson, 2016) which are being safe, inclusion and collaboration.
This also led to pursue our equity/cultural proficiency work by intentionally tying it to instruction by the Going Beyond Access Framework (Chardin, 2020) which I developed. This framework is grounded in the work of Dr. Beverly Daniels Tatum, Dr. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot and Dr. Christopher Emdin. The framework comprises three components: impact over intentions, learner visibility and authentic relevance.
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Impact Over Intentions: According to Dr. Beverly Daniels Tatum, “the work is not about intentions; it’s about impact.” One of the ways that we address the question of whether or not we are valuing impact over intentions is through restorative practices. Restorative Practices are a range of approaches—affective statements, affective questions, impromptu conferences, Tier 1 Circles, Tier 2 Restorative Circles, and Tier 3 Restorative Conferences—that aim to develop community and to manage conflict and tensions by repairing harm and restoring relationships. Since its inception, our office referrals have been reduced by half and suspensions have been cut by two-thirds. It is important to note that restorative practices work in concert with a range of strategies that we have incorporated into our practice, including: staffing, cultural proficiency, professional learning, student engagement, relationship building, and objective-driven instruction.
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Learner Visibility: Drawing on Dr. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot’s work on voice, value, and visibility, we ask the question, “Can all students see themselves reflected in our work?” We have been committed to actively recruiting faculty and staff who represent and reflect the diversity of our students; and, for the last 3 years we have had a faculty and staff which is more than 50% people of color. Learner visibility has also been the frame for us to consider how we are including windows and mirrors in our curriculum as well as on the walls of our classrooms and the hallways of our building.
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Authentic Relevance: Authentic relevance, derived from Dr. Christopher Emdin’s Reality Pedagogy, asks us to consider: Is the work authentically relevant and how do we know? This requires that we must know and work in conjunction with both our students and their families. Two ways we do this are through our school-wide advisory system (which includes: a core-value focused portfolio, an organization system, independent reading goals, and Story of Self) and family engagement strategies (which include: rolling conferences, Community Conversations on Identity & Diversity, Annual Back to School Night & Community Cookout, and International Potluck & Report Card Pick Up).
This also influenced our commitment to developing multiple professional learning opportunities which normalized through design, democratic practice through listening and learning together. This allowed staff to identify what we were exploring and provided options in regard to how they could choose to engage.
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Staff Meetings (which have focused on foundational texts such as Glenn Singleton’s Courageous Conversations About Race and Zaretta Hammond’s Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain), which were Universally Designed to taking into consideration variability among staff including identity and that provided choices and options in regard to participation and engagement. This means that we communicated to staff that we trusted them, by providing them with choice in what they would learn as well as how they would participate.
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Staff Intensives (choice offerings including determined by staff based on areas of need that they’d like to explore and develop additional expertise in. Some examples of these include The State of Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s Inclusive Practice Academy; Design Thinking; Race, Gender, & Intersectionality; Restorative Practices Through Cogenerative Groups; Neurodiversity & Cool Teaching Stuff). Many of these were facilitated by staff, and if no one on the team had expertise in the content that the staff wanted to explore, we’d bring in outside experts.
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Common Planning Times three times a week, which served as intentional learning communities as opposed to professional learning communities.
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Instruction & Learning (examining student work, instruction, and data) through usage of protocols to normalize public practice, public critic and colleague-driven critical feedback to peers.
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Student Support (strengths-based, inquiry approach to supporting all students; grounded in restorative practice) to ensure that the approach was outcome-driven and in a manner that ensured students were not shamed or blamed.
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Team Time & Logistics (time to plan and build the team) for teachers to meet without administration to plan, bond and support each other.
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School-Level Department Time focused on ambitious instructional strategies and making thinking visible, to reinforce that we were all corporately on the same page and focused on the same goals. We used a less is more approach to ensure that we only worked on 2–3 rich and big goals at a time.
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This work is reinforced through walkthroughs, modeling, informal observations, and coaching; again to ensure that we were lifting up being in a culture of public practice which included critic from peers, students, community members and caregivers.
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Community Conversations About Race and Identity with Caregivers and Community members, as a means of creating a space and vehicle for adults in the community to learn about race and identity to support their capacity to participate in and support our work.
Conclusion
As educators, our mission is to solve the question: How do we create school communities that have the courage and willingness to do education differently? We need to recognize that we must not solely focus on test scores but we must understand that we are dealing with human beings that someday are going to take over this world. To me, this means fully embracing the words of John Dewey, “that school is not a rehearsal for life, it is life.” Our institutions need to be as authentic as possible to honor the great responsibility they have. Truly being authentic means embracing having a clear sense of vision as well as a firm commitment to our goals, with the acknowledgment of achieving them through flexible means, which include normalizing vulnerability by ensuring that voice and democratic practices are at the center of the work. My experiences as a student and Fenway High and then as the leader of the Putnam Avenue Upper School serve as evidence that when educators are committed to the notion of democratic schools, they can make magic happen, by transforming the lives of all of those involved in the process.
References
Anderson, M. (2016). Choosing to learn. Learning to choose. ASCD.
Chardin, N. (2020). Equity by design: Delivering on the power and promise of UDL Massachusetts Elementary and Secondary Department of Education Culturally Responsive Leading profile. https://www.doe.mass.edu/instruction/culturally-responsive/profile-series-paus.docx
Novak Education. (2022). What are restorative practices? https://www.novakeducation.com/blog/what-are-restorative-practices
School Reform Initiative Protocols. (n.d.) https://www.schoolreforminitiative.org/protocols/
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Chardin, M. (2024). From Being a Student in a Democratic School to Founding One. In: Nathan, L.F., Mendonca, J.F., Rojas Ayala, G. (eds) Designing Democratic Schools and Learning Environments. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46297-9_23
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