Tag Archives: Social Change

SRI’s Summer Confab Featured Music Video from Eagle Rock School

The School Reform Initiative (SRI) recently held its first virtual Summer Meeting. Traditionally, SRI — an independent, non-profit organization that supports the creation of transformational learning communities — hosts an annual face-to-face gathering each fall where educators come together and renew their commitment to educational equity and excellence.

However, this year, given the current health and economic conditions across the country and the concerns related to travel due to COVID-19, the Houston-based organization put off its fall meeting in Memphis until next year, and opted instead to host a summer meeting online. And while the format for coming together as a community of learners changed, what didn’t is SRI’s focus on serving as an agent for its community of facilitators who work with schools, districts, and other agencies and organizations to give students what they need to be successful — regardless of their internal and external social and cultural contexts.

During the opening session of the virtually presented event, Eagle Rock students were highlighted in a music video they created in an Eagle Rock School class named Reflect, Connect, and Create Music. The five-minute video, which you can watch below, features expressive rap, songs, and instrumentals, illustrated by scenes of protest and support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

 

Reflect, Connect, and Create Music was taught by our Societies & Cultures Instructional Specialist, Cedric Josey, and our 2020/2021 Public Allies Fellow in Residential Life, Lucia Sicius. The class encouraged students to focus on reflection, expression, and connection, through music — especially in the time of a global pandemic.

To our way of thinking, especially in the midst of a global health pandemic, students need us to Continue reading…

New Class Offerings Challenge Students’ Leadership, Learning Capacities

Among the visions we pursue here at Eagle Rock School and Professional Development Center is for each of our nation’s students to become meaningfully engaged in his or her own education. That objective sounds good on paper, but where it differs from other schools is that our own students — students here at Eagle Rock School — actually learn in part by engaging.

What is standard practice here at Eagle Rock — and what we have made available to our students for more than two decades — are both traditional and nontraditional classroom offerings that ignite the imagination, encourage curiosity, and prepare young minds for the real world.

Classes

With that in mind, we have just introduced seven new classes to the curriculum for this, the second half of our first trimester at Eagle Rock for 2018. These five-week classes join three 10-week classes that began in January and are still underway.

Those 10-week classes include Data Analysis, where students continue to use statistics to look for patterns to self-generated questions. A second 10-week class — Neuroscience — has students examining not only the physical makeup of the brain, but the physiology, or habits, of the human nervous system. And in Exposure, the third 10-week class, students have been mastering black & white photography, processing their film in a darkroom, and are now preparing their photographs for a public exhibition in just a few weeks.

Below is a brief description of the new classes at Eagle Rock that got underway just this week: Continue reading…