This need for funding EduCrate originated when The SchoolWorks Lab, Inc. began researching a response to the millions of children around the world that do not have access to schools. While designing a solution for disaster areas like the tsunami-ravaged South East Asia, the recycled shipping container became the essential building block. Our shipping container solution for rebuilding schools in disaster and conflict areas opened up the possibility of applying this solution to an entirely new market—building low-cost, sustainable, ready-to-use schools in underserved communities here in the United States.

Disaster Relief Classrooms

EduCrate™ Quick Relief Classrooms are modular structures that have been customized for use as temporary schools in disaster/conflict areas and can also be used as community resource centers to locate and reunite missing or displaced people. The EduCrate Quick Relief Classroom is the quickest, strongest, safest solution for communities that have suffered from natural disasters or are living in conflict zones.

We provide a solution in compliance with the International Rescue Committee’s Minimum Standards for Education Emergencies for re-establishing educationally displaced children back into safe, comfortable, and appropriate learning environments as quickly as possible – and we are ready to partner with organizations around the world to accomplish this goal.

Building Schools in the United States

EduCrate™ Modular Classrooms are a green building solution to school construction in underserved communities by transforming recycled shipping containers into powerful, ready-to-use, learning environments that are cost-efficient and sustainable.

The Advanced PeaceBuilders program at PS 119 in Brooklyn, New York, lead by Hawley Hussey, teaching artist and point-person, has contacted The SchoolWorks Lab, Inc. to provide an EduCrate Modular Classroom to serve as a learning center to make and display art. An independent Special Needs school in Rye, NH is a strong possibility to serve as a prototype site. They are looking to expand their facilities and they have adequate land/space. This site could provide valuable feedback to the development of the EduCrate Modular Classroom.

Introduction

The Advanced PeaceBuilders at PS119, lead by Hawley Hussey, teaching artist and leader, have contacted The SchoolWorks Lab, Inc. to provide the first EduCrate Learning Center in their schoolyard at a cost of $20,000.

PS 119

“Our mission at P.S. 119 Amersfort School of Social Awareness – The Magnet School of Global & Ethical Studies – is to foster within students the abilities and self-confidence essential to develop academic and social skills by providing students with comprehensive programs implemented by highly skilled, nurturing professionals dedicated to excellence in education (from the PS119 website)

Peacebuilders

PeaceBuilders is the renowned violence prevention and character education youth program approved for the federally funded Safe and Drug-Free Schools Act. It is a comprehensive community-based program that shifts the entire organizational climate to a peaceful, productive and safe place for children, parents and the community.

EduCrate Learning Centers

Born as shipping containers, EduCrate Learning Centers are made into powerful learning environments, customized to the needs of local education authorities. EduCrates can be quickly shipped to regions in need, and are 1/3 the cost of a traditionally-built classroom. First on our list is PS 119 in Brooklyn, NY. We need to raise $20,000 to get this model site up and running. Help us go viral by spreading the word!

Creating More Powerful Learning Environments

EduCrate Learning Centers are designed to respond to the need for instant and permanent places of learning to restore education hope for children. EduCrate Learning Centers are built in response to the needs of local educational authorities, and customized to the exact specifications of the user. EduCrate Learning Centers come filled with ready-to-use and grade-appropriate online curriculums for K-12 and adult coursework. EduCrates can be customized to any order, and can include generators, bathrooms, water stations and medical support, but their primary use is intended as a place of learning.

Need: Permanent Schools

Haiti has suffered a devastating setback to its schools when the earthquake leveled an estimated 3,978 buildings. UNICEF has supported school re-construction in three different phases: temporary, semi-permanent, and permanent schools. UNICEF has done an incredible job in providing 1,644 tents as temporary schools while looking towards semi-permanent structures. There is a need right now to establish a permanent school building program, and EduCrate Learning Centers can help.

Solution: EduCrate Learning Centers

EduCrate Learning Centers can be used as stand-alone centers or modularly combined into schools and delivered anywhere in the world within a few months of placing an order to engage struggling minds, change the way we learn and acquire knowledge, and to restore hope in educational possibilities. EduCrate Learning Centers are designed as modular classrooms, and can be combined in a variety of ways to suit local educational needs. Modular learning stations can be configured to suit the purpose of teaching individuals, groups of two, or many students. Learning stations are supported by computers networked to servers with thousands of curriculum units available on demand. Curriculum can be downloaded for K-5, 6-8, 9-12, college and adult learning modules.

Our crisis management solutions are research-based, and comply with the International Rescue Committee’s Minimum Standards for Education Emergencies. In consultation and collaboration with key stakeholders, there is a rapid initial assessment of education Capacity , vulnerability and risks that conveys an accurate representation of the situation to inform an education response.

Instructional rescue continues where learning opportunities are identified, created, and provided in a safe and secure environment where all stakeholders collaborate and cooperate to ensure inclusivity in activities and services. It is paramount that the learning environment — and routes to and from — must provide a physically secure and protected space that is conducive to learning, and supports personal well-being. A responsive curriculum is developed and implemented to address the needs of the learners. The outcome of our work is to start with instructional rescue and end by providing a safe environment and age-appropriate curriculum to advance learning and restore hope.

Who is Behind EduCrate?

"I think all children are incredible learners," says Dr. Rob Southworth, inventor of the portable classroom called EduCrate. "I have dedicated my life's work to helping create circumstances where children can learn. When we create or restore learning environments that support success for every student, we are harnessing the power of learning to improve our world. EduCrate is one way that we can help make this possible for every child, in any circumstance. We must give them the power to learn and the power to make our world a better place." (February 13, 2007).

The power of learning is the power to make our world better, and children who are given that power can grow up to change our world. Sadly, for many children throughout the world, school is out of reach or non-existent. EduCrate, a portable classroom that can be delivered anywhere in the world where there is a lack of school buildings, grows out of The SchoolWorks Lab's mission to support greater learning, and new possibilities, for all students:

Our research work in urban instructional environments, arts-integrated classrooms, and different styles of assessment resulted in helping our partners create more powerful learning environments. It also revealed thousands of school sites that have been destroyed by natural or man-made disasters, a problem we had not predicted. One of our responses is to provide a portable classroom that delivers the power of education to children who have lost all hope of learning.

Dr. Robert A. Southworth, Jr. (President and Principal Investigator of the SchoolWorks Lab, Inc.) is a teacher, scholar, and leader with expertise in evaluation and research, specializing in research strategies to uncover and analyze “hard to understand” social problems. After teaching theater in K-12 schools, conducting a professional career in theater as an Assistant Director at the Denver Center Theatre Company and The American Conservatory Theater, he returned to higher education and worked at the National Center for Restructuring, Education and Schools (NCREST), while attaining his doctorate in the Curriculum and Teaching Department at Teachers College Columbia University.

Dr. Southworth has taught at Adelphi University, Bank Street College of Education, and for seven years as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Teachers College, where he taught courses on school reform and change employing assessment of instructional learning goals in order to produce new leaders.

He is the founder and president of The SchoolWorks Lab, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to school reform research, assessment and dissemination. Rob has been successful in supporting schools, districts, cultural organizations, and educational leaders in evaluating the effect of their organization's efforts on the improvement of student achievement. Dr. Southworth has conducted scientifically based research studies to examine the impact of the arts on academic achievement. He is currently studying national models for assessment in theater, alignment of standards across the arts, the transfer of learning from the arts to other subjects, and the assessment of all four arts nationally.

Welcome back from summer vacation! There is a provocative article in the NY Times today about study habits that throws some common assumptions under the train; for example, one place to study, studying by cramming instead of studying with practice tests, etc:

Every September, millions of parents in the United States try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies). For instance, instead of sticking to one study location, simply alternating the room where a person studies improves retention. So does studying distinct but related skills or concepts in one sitting, rather than focusing intensely on a single thing. “We have known these principles for some time, and it's intriguing that schools don't pick them up, or that people don't learn them by trial and error,” said Dr. Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at UCLA. “Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”

So it would seem that cognitive scientists quoted in this story don't agree with these time honored ways to help children sail out of the summer doldrums and into the fall winds of success. What do you think? What would educational specialist say?

Does Free-market equal Common Good?

I have been thinking about the current reform emphasis and hoping for the best. Large steps are needed and schools that are failing need drastic Intervention and help. However, there is some slippage in Implementation of the reforms and they may not be responding to students who are growing apart from our common community.

As the Obama administration's educational reform movement increasingly adopts the interests and values of a "free-market" culture, many students graduate public schooling and higher education with an impoverished political imagination, unable to recognize injustice and unfairness. They often find themselves invested in a notion of unattached individualism that severs them from any sense of moral and social responsibility to others or to a larger notion of the common good (Henry Giroux, 2010; Turthout Blog; http://www.truthout.org/dumbing-down-teachers-attacking-colleges-education-name-reform59820).

assessment

Additionally, the role of assessment in supporting all students to achieve at their highest levels is not working well under current reform thinking. Continued use of one-shot high-stakes testing with the result that students become marginalized to good teaching is just not right.

At the same time, those students who jeopardize the achievement of the quantifiable measures and instrumental values now used to define school success are often subjected to harsh disciplinary procedures, pushed out of schools, subjected to medical interventions or, even worse, pushed into the criminal justice system.[1] Most of these students are poor whites and minorities of color and, increasingly, students with Special Needs (Henry Giroux, 2010; Turthout Blog; http://www.truthout.org/dumbing-down-teachers-attacking-colleges-education-name-reform59820).

SchoolWorks Lab Retreat at Cragged Mountain Farm in Freedom, NH
August 16-20, 2010

Two hours north of Boston in the New Hampshire White Mountains lies a gem, Cragged Mountain Farm, an “old-school” summer camp full of rustic cabins that will host artists and educators for a one-week camp retreat. Participants will have time to take their pioneering art experiences and transform them into new thinking that can be used to sustain arts Partnerships in schools. This retreat offers participants, aka campers, the opportunity to live, eat and develop new thinking and new stories about arts integration.