Upper School students participate in Climate (EX)Change program

Several Upper School students recently completed a four-week Climate (EX)Change with peers from Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School in South Paris, Maine, and Friends Seminary School in New York City. This collaborative storytelling project resulted from community engagement programming at Waynflete’s Remote Learning Hub.

Grounded in a single unit of Layered City, a yearlong class at Friends Seminary School, the Climate (EX)Change enabled small groups from all three schools to share images and recorded audio on the themes of transportation, food, land, air, water, and energy. Students also reflected on how their lives and communities are affected by climate change.

This project is an example of the kind of critical thinking and creative leadership that can emerge when high school students are given the opportunity. Each group was tasked with meeting on their own during the week and ultimately creating a website. The class website for the Climate (EX)Change can be found here, with individual group websites linked within. 

For Upper School students interested in using art as a medium for social justice activism, Andrew Harrison and Remy Mansfield will be teaching a three-week online class during Waynflete’s Summer Term. Layered City: Rethinking Monuments, a for-credit class, will encourage students to use critical and creative approaches to examine and interrogate the public monuments in their own communities and to consider the stories that aren’t told when monuments are erected.

Read an article about the project in the Portland Press Herald (May 17, 2021)