Mindblown

Mark Twain said he never let his schooling interfere with his education.
Now I reckon that’s good advice. Personal experience proves that the messy lessons learned from interacting with the world tend to differ (often drastically) from the nicetidyrows of theory provided in our traditional institutions of learning. We’ve always needed exposure to the real stuff and the right people (at key points along the way) to make the best connections.
And that’s where that old adage comes in … ” it takes a village to raise a child -and a community to educate it”. I believe we should be actively seeking more opportunities for doing just that.

Community Responsibility
Our kids (most of em) need more scaffolded opportunities to become VALUED, ACTIVE and VISIBLE members of our communities – and as communities that’s exactly what we want for them. Responsibility, A Sense of Belonging, Citizenship, Contribution etc. Our schools are asked to teach our students essential values and key competencies . They’re doing their absolute best to do this but surely these essential social ’skills’ can be taught, applied and reinforced more effectively in a wider social environment.
We need to provide more opportunities for our students to collaborate and learn the ‘important stuff’ with valued community members by tapping into our people resources and creating conditions that will keep our students safely engaged as they interact and learn.

Partners in Learning
We’ve gathered some great ideas from an online survey we conducted with community members (wider community).We intend to use these ideas and begin exploring possibilities that may help develop effective partnerships.
This video explains what we’re thinking, what we believe we need and why. We would love you to watch it and start talking about HOW we can involve our students as more active community members.We made it to take out to our local industry, businesses, services and the wider community – in the hope that we can provoke discussion and start talking together about becoming REAL partners in learning. The second half of the video is an invitation from our students for our community to join us. Lyrics and actions by students of the College Kapahaka group.
We’d all love some feedback !
(Thanks to Jordan who did a great job of the narration and a huge thanks to Mike Graham, Gerelle Emery and our kids in the College Kapa Haka Group – who make us proud
Video is about 6 mins.