It’s Saturday morning, and Cramlington Learning Village, in Northeast England, is buzzing with activity. In the courtyard, students stand proudly beside an enormous birdhouse that they built themselves, and submitted to the Guinness Book of World Records for consideration. In a tent nearby, more young people are performing music that they spent the week perfecting in impromptu gigs on the streets of Newcastle.
Inside, students offer samples of food cooked to recipes developed with help from professional chefs, using seasonal produce grown in the school’s own garden. The students have tested and refined their recipes all week, until they reached a professional standard. They have also self-published a combined gardening guide and cookbook. Another group shows off their guide to bird watching in the local area, complete with meticulously hand-drawn maps and pictures of local birds.
Today is Cramlington’s annual Festival of Learning, and the school’s halls are packed with students, parents, siblings, teachers, volunteers, local historians, musicians, amateur birdwatchers – all the people who have helped make the students’ projects possible.
In one room, the audience climbs into a boat to experience a multimedia tour of the River
Tyne’s history. Another room is full of the picture books that students wrote, illustrated, and then read aloud to pupils in a local primary school.
The work on display today has not been specially-selected: the whole school is putting their accomplishments on show. Some students have produced work that exceeds everyone’s expectations. Some are only now becoming conscious of the disparity between the quality of their work and that of their
peers. Nobody is thinking about the marks they hope to receive – they are all worrying about how the audience will respond.
In preparation for today, students have been conducting research both online and throughout their town. They have produced draft after draft of their work, had it critiqued by their classmates, and refined it until it was ready for presentation. Their work with local people and local businesses has broadened their horizons at the same time that it deepened their understanding of the place they come from.
Teachers are no longer their students’ primary sources of information. Instead, they are the designers of learning who created the conditions for the students to conduct their own enquiries, and advisers to whom learners can come as they create their product.