Beyond Boundaries

Beyond Boundaries is a year long multi-media research augmented by course work, that seeks to move students beyond what is typically an insular global perspective and deepen their sense of the world's texture. Each student will adopt a piece of the planet, a very small piece, and strategize a path into learning everything there is to know about life there from the perspective of a fourteen year old. Students will move beyond conventional research modalities and be thinking increasingly in terms of the kinds of things you learn in conversations, letters, newspapers, contemporary art and music.

 

What each student will be assembling, piece by piece, is a world view seen through a prism other than their own. Not only will our students reflect more profoundly on their own lives once they have gained a deeper understanding of the lives of others, but they will enter high school with a clearer sense that global citizenship is based on reciprocal understanding and cannot evolve in a vacuum.

 

The Beyond Boundaries Project will be coordinated by Mrs. Becky Cordier and Ms. Terese Dennison.  Research will be facilitated Kim and Dr. Julian Kunnie utilizing Green Fields resources as well as the University of Arizona. Each student will be assembling a portfolio of information throughout the year and be required to interview someone outside of our academic community with expertise in their subject. Now and then course work will formally overlap with the Beyond Boundaries Project and each student's area of inquiry will be noted on a map of the world displayed on campus throughout the year. In the spring the eighth grade class will decide as a group how they would like to share the most important conclusions of their work with the rest of the school.

 

The Beyond Boundaries Project embraces several aspects of Senior Masterwork and is in many ways a precursor to that effort. By the time students have entered the eighth grade they are ready to surprise themselves as thinkers and appreciate the difference between curiosity presented as an opportunity and a platitude.