Learning looks a little different at The Community School.
Instead of six periods a day like a traditional high school, these Option school students engage in project-based learning assignments that integrate curriculum, like English Language Arts and Social Studies, as they explore needs and issues that are relevant to the Spokane community.
“The project is a vehicle to teach the content,” explained Nate Seaburg, who is co-facilitating the project “My Vote, My Voice” this quarter with Dave Egly. About 70 juniors and seniors are participating in the project to consider the question, “How do I participate in democracy?”
“Instead of the lecture, quiz, test format, we do big projects,” Dave said (these TCS facilitators are on a first-name basis in their classrooms).
“What is an authentic need that the community has, and then how do we reverse engineer our way to the content that we think students should know?” Nate said, explaining how project topics are selected.
And while the projects are organized and structured by facilitators, the students often lead the learning process.
“If we’re doing our job, they’re running it,” Nate said.
At the end of a project, students produce a final product to demonstrate their learning in a way that reaches back to the community with a public-facing result.
For “My Vote, My Voice,” students are producing the TCS Election Chronicle, which is a bit like an enhanced voter guide with information on candidates and initiatives or ballot measures, as well as articles about election-related topics and issues, like gerrymandering, voter suppression, and polling.
By the end of this project, students will walk away with an understanding of civics, media literacy, critical thinking, research skills and graphic design.
“We are only teaching tools that can actually be used in the context of the real world and future careers,” said Nate.
“It’s not abstract,” Dave added. “We try to make it fit into something big.”
And this year’s election is big, all right, with the president, multiple federal and state legislative positions, nine state constitutional officers (including the governor), and several tax-related initiatives, measures, and propositions being presented to Spokane County voters on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024.
“Every vote does matter, there have been elections overturned by one vote,” said junior Annika Weber as she reflected on what she’s learned. “We are future voters, and it’s important for us to be educated and informed to make decisions in voting – and in life – that are not based off of a guess.”
“Younger people aren’t voting as much, and I think they if they’re more informed and know a lot more to help them make their decisions, I think they’d vote a lot more,” added Riley Milsom, also a junior. “A year ago, I had no idea how the voting process worked or how to put a vote in.”
At the end of the project, Dave and Nate hope students have a broad understanding of our country’s political system.
“We’re very careful to not tell them what to think, but we’re very clear about how to think as far as looking for reliable sources and questioning our own assumptions,” Nate said.
TCS has offered an election-related project several times before, and facilitators continually work to refine processes so students will get the most out of the experience.
Over a project’s 8-week timeline, students are often out of the classroom, engaging with stakeholders and experts, or inviting guests into the school. They meet benchmarks along the way, producing smaller results along the way in the lead up to the final product.
This project’s first benchmark asked the question, “How do we find reliable information? What do professional fact checkers do?”
So they went straight to the source: local media.
Student groups learned about how journalism works, media bias, and journalistic ethics before analyzing recently published articles in The Spokesman-Review. Then, they invited two reporters and one editor of local newspaper to participate in a Q&A panel at the school.
The paper’s Spokane County reporter Nick Gibson, education reporter Elena Perry, and government editor Jonathan Brunt shared about their backgrounds in journalism before students approached with questions related to the articles – why a reporter or editor might choose one word over another, when they decide to use quotes or paraphrases, and how an interviewe subject's statements might influence the tone of an article.
“Our goal is not to decide whether something is good or not. We’re letting people know what’s happening in the community. They get to decide what to do with that,” Brunt said.
They also shared that some choices aren’t always up to the individual reporter, as the Spokesman has an in-house style guide and follows the Associated Press style guide, which sets industry standards for certain word choices, Gibson explained.
One student asked about their personal writing processes; Perry has little trinkets at her desk that she’ll play with as she writes while listening to energetic music.
Following the panel, several students rushed to the front to ask one-on-one questions, eager to learn more about opportunities in journalism.
“We always want to put professional, successful adults in front of students,” Nate said.
He also hopes that in this exploration of media bias, they’ll learn that it’s nearly impossible to be totally neutral.
“I hope they have some empathy for reporters and an appreciation for just how complex it is to write something that’s ‘down the middle.’”
Especially as their own writing will be evaluated by the community when the TCS Election Chronicle is available on Tuesday, Oct. 29. A digital version will be published online, with some print versions available at the school (1025 W Spofford Ave).