BRATTLEBORO — During the past several months, the students of Hilltop Montessori School's middle school have been learning about their community and some of the people who help make this town such a vibrant place to live.
Paul Dedell, the middle school director, quotes Wallace Stegner, who in his essay “The Sense of Place,” wrote: “a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it.”
Stegner also wrote: “No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments.”
Taking Stegner's words to heart, the school's 22 seventh- and eighth-graders selected community members to shadow and interview about their work.
Dedell explains that this assignment was part of Hilltop's “Society Project,” in which each student connects with someone in the community, conducts an interview and photo shoot and, from this material, creates a video montage and photo collage.
After spending seven weeks learning about the work of local merchants, community leaders, service providers, artists, and nonprofit directors, these busy students will present a collection of films and artwork which document the work of two dozen people who work in this area at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center on Friday, Jan. 17 at 7 p.m.
In addition to the documentary films, the students have produced photo collages about their subjects, which will be on display at Amy's Bakery Arts Café on Main Street through January.
The students also created original handmade books about various topics in Brattleboro history.
That project lets the middle schoolers combine academic research with creative flights of imagination, including the impact of Interstate 91 on the town and the water-cure craze of the 19th century. These books are on display during January at the Brooks Memorial Library on Main Street in Brattleboro.
Hilltop Montessori School is an independent school serving children from 18 months old to eighth grade. The school employs the educational approach developed by Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori.
According to Wikipedia, this educational philosophy is “characterized by an emphasis on independence, freedom within limits, and respect for a child's natural psychological, physical, and social development.”
Montessori usually focuses on early education, and Dedell estimates that “only about 25 percent of all the Montessori schools in the nation include the seventh and eighth grades,” he says.
Nonetheless, he is convinced that the Montessori approach can be especially fruitful for adolescents in the middle school.
The human condition
Hilltop's “Society Project” is one aspect of “Sense of Place,” which itself is one section of Hilltop's yearlong study, “What Does It Mean to Be Human?”
The curriculum is comprised of a series of four units.
The first is “Walk in the Woods,” where, as Dedell explains, students work outdoors on Hilltop's upland campus as they learn to “become stewards of their own quarter acres of earth that act as their laboratory, art studio, and piece of Walden as they design and perform lab experiments, build specimen collections, identify species, observe their surroundings, read and study the great naturalists.”
In another unit, “Struggle for Peace,” students discover “the myriad of underlying causes and outcomes for these conflicts (historical, economic, religious, etc.) and compare them to issues in our lives.”
In “River of Spirit,” students explore the Connecticut River watershed with field trips to the wastewater treatment center and the Pleasant Valley Water Filtration Plant.
In the recently completed unit, “Sense of Place,” students looked at the fundamentals of human society in Brattleboro, as they explored contemporary society through the town's historic, economic, service, governmental, legal, environmental, religious, and arts institutions.
Dedell points out that poet Wendell Berry once said, “If you don't know where you are, you don't know who you are.”
“This simple yet provocative idea has been at the center of the Hilltop Montessori Middle School's six-week-long Sense of Place study that has taken its students far beyond the classroom to explore, up close and personal, the true meaning of 'community,'” writes Dedell in the students' curriculum overview.
Hilltop's middle-school students have immersed themselves in a comprehensive study of both the ordinary and the extraordinary people, places, and events of Brattleboro by “poring over Historical Society archives, discovering primary source materials at the library, digging through decades of deeds in the town clerk's office, engaging in surveys, interviews, photo shoots, and conversations in the busy shops and businesses of downtown Brattleboro and in the quiet rooms of Holton Memorial Home and Pine Heights Nursing and Rehabilitation Center,” says Dedell.
A special project during this study was the “Society Project.” Each student had to select an individual who had a fundamental identity and contact with the civic life of Brattleboro.
To get them going in interviewing and photographing, the students were offered some examples: a police officer, a local member of the clergy, a downtown merchant or street vendor, someone involved in education or the environment, or a local artist.
Students chose a wide array of people, including Serenity Smith Forchion, co-founder of New England Center for Circus Arts; Alex Gyori, general manager of the Brattleboro Food Co-op; Tim Johnson, news director at WTSA; Eugene Uman, artistic director of Vermont Jazz Center; violin maker Doug Cox, and BMAC Director Danny Lichtenfeld.
Each student then had to arrange and conduct an interview, schedule a photo shoot, and plan the setup list based on the story that he or she wanted to tell.
“It is important that each student has a thesis about what they wanted to say through this person,” says Dedell. “A thesis statement is central to everything we do at Hilltop, including math and science.”
Each student would then conduct at least one photo shoot, during which approximately 200 photos would be taken. Then the students would first edit the photos into a collage, and ultimately turn the photos into an approximately two-minute digital video photomontage that will be shared with families and the Brattleboro community on Jan. 17.
“The BMAC showing will be the event of season,” Dedell confidently says. “We are inviting not only the students, their subjects, and their families, but the whole community whose story they are telling.”
Dedell believes that this unit has been an amazing process for his students.
“The adolescent brain is on fire, and ours was an exercise to use that incredible potential,” he says. “The Society Project is just one piece in Hilltop's goal to encourage our students to reach out and advocate for themselves. The students found that the people in Brattleboro were invariably generous and gracious to help.”