Content
Spring 2010 : Look
Get together, share ideas, listen, think, grow.
Sign up to be the first to hear about what we’re doing around the state.
Look
Oregon Humanities: Spring 2010
Giving Kids a Choice
Redmond turns a four-day school week into a learning experience.
Last summer, when budget constraints pushed Central Oregon’s Redmond School District into a four-day school week, the community decided to try to make that fifth day into a different kind of learning experience. The results, dubbed Choice Friday, are giving some five hundred Redmond students a new kind of education.
“It’s about schools getting out into the community and the community getting out into the schools,” says Choice Friday’s volunteer chair, Jamie Christman. “It’s a new paradigm.”
Some of Choice Friday’s offerings are essentially traditional after-school activities: crafts, sports, the sorts of things kids do in summer camp. But other programs—an academy with the Redmond Police Department, a buddy program with disabled children—have proved both unconventional and popular.
The creativity and big-picture thinking that Christman is trying to build shows in such programs as Global Nomads (a cultural exploration for the area’s international exchange students) and Literature and the Outdoors (a course combining leadership, English, science, and physical education).
Choice Friday, says Christman, isn’t about simply filling in an empty day. “This is about creating an entire learning community beyond the classroom,” she says. “That means adults as well as kids. And what’s really exciting are the students from middle and high school hopping on board and creating those next-level programs. But it’s like trying to build a jet while you’re flying it. It’s innovative, but very challenging.”
Directory
Links for this page
Subscribe
If you reside in Oregon and would like a free subscription to Oregon Humanities magazine, please sign up here. You will also be signed up to receive our monthly e-newsletter.
Masthead
Staff, advisors, etc.
- Kathleen Holt
- Editor
- McGuire Barber Design
- Graphic design
- Eloise Holland
- Communications Coordinator
- Allison Dubinsky
- Copy editor
- Editorial Advisory Board
- Tom Booth
- Brian Doyle
- Debra Gwartney
- Julia Heydon
- Guy Maynard
- Win McCormack
- Kathleen Dean Moore
- Camela Raymond
- Kate Sage
- Rich Wandschneider
- Dave Weich
Oregon Humanities magazine examines topics of broad public interest from a variety of perspectives and approaches. Recent issues of this publication have focused on stuff, nostalgia, and civility. Through good and thoughtful writing, Oregon Humanities magazine enriches our understanding of important subjects and stimulates conversation and reflection among readers, their friends, families, colleagues, and neighbors.
Contributors
Caroline Cummins
Caroline Cummins is the managing editor of Culinate.com.
Christine Dupres
Christine Dupres is the former director of the Office of Sustainability and Community Engagement at the Native American Youth and Family Center in Portland. She is a freelance writer and an Oregon Humanities board member.
Ellen Santasiero
Ellen Santasiero is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Northwest Review, The Sun, Marlboro Review, Oregon Humanities, and in a recent anthology from the University of Oklahoma Press. She is at work on a memoir.
Karen Karbo
Karen Karbo‘s three novels, as well as her Oregon Book Award–winning memoir, The Stuff of Life, have all been named New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her most recent book is The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World’s Most Elegant Woman.
Lisa Radon
Lisa Radon has written about art and design for Portland Spaces (as associate editor), Portland Monthly, Surface Design Journal, SHIFT (Japan), FLAUNT, Hyperallergic, and ultra (ultrapdx.com). She’s written a handful of catalog essays and is working on her first book.
R. Gregory Nokes
R. Gregory Nokes has worked as a reporter and editor for the Associated Press and the Oregonian. His reporting about this incident has resulted in a formal designation of the massacre site as Chinese Massacre Cove. He lives in West Linn.
Rich Wandschneider
Rich Wandschneider was the founding director of Fishtrap, a literary nonprofit in eastern Oregon, and is now building the Alvin Josephy Library of Western History and Culture at Fishtrap. He writes a regular newspaper column and has written for the Oregonian, High Desert Journal, High Country News, and others. He is on the editorial advisory board of this magazine and on the board of directors for Oregon Humanities.
Scott Nadelson
Scott Nadelson’s most recent book is The Cantor’s Daughter. He teaches creative writing at Willamette University.
Add a comment
Commentary introduction