Greater Egleston Community High School

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Exemplar Type: CASE STUDY
Title: Greater Egleston Community High School
Grades: High School (9-12)
Discipline: Interdisciplinary | Social Studies
Submitted By: Greg Smith

Summary: For a number of years, students at the Greater Egleston Community High School in Boston were provided with similar opportunities to affect public policy on environmental and social issues in their own community. Although the school’s focus has shifted during the past six or seven years, for more than a decade, teachers there sought to prepare its primarily Black and Latino students to become community leaders committed to enhancing the health and livability of Roxbury, one of Boston’s less affluent neighborhoods.

Big Ideas

  • All systems have limits. Healthy systems live within their limits. Tap the power of limits

  • The changes to the Earth's surface environments made by human activity are causing unintended consequences on the health and well-being of human and other life on Earth (proposed Anthropocene Epoch)

Higher Order Thinking Skills

  • Emergent: Creative Thinking

  • Complex: Critical Thinking

Dispositions

  • Courageous

  • Curious

  • Efficacious

  • Motivated

  • Persevering

  • Resilience

  • Caring

  • Collaborative

  • Compassionate

  • Ethical

  • Place/Community Conscious

  • Respectful

  • Responsible

Applied Knowledge

  • Inventing The Future

  • Strong Sense of Place

  • Healthy Commons

  • System Dynamics and Change

  • Responsible Local and Global Citizenship

Applications and Actions

  • Engage in Dialogue

  • Plan Scenarios

  • Teach and Learn

  • Contribute to the regenerative capacity of the systems upon which we depend

  • Envision, strategize and plan

  • Govern from the bottom up

  • Lead by example

  • Leave every place better than you found it

  • Take responsibility for the effect you have on future generations

  • Serve your community

Community Connections

  • Students and teachers make authentic contributions to sustainable community development through service learning opportunities, project-based and place based learning opportunities for students that are laterally and vertically embedded in the core curriculum

  • Provide Internships for students