“Problem-posing education affirms men and women as beings in the process of becoming”.
-Paulo Freire
Our inaugural year of the Advanced Research Capstone course for 12th grade students will kick off September 2019 at St. John’s Preparatory School (Danvers, MA) when we welcome our students back from their (hopefully) rejuvenating summer break. The publicly stated mission of our school is “St. John's Prep, an inclusive, Catholic, Xaverian Brothers Sponsored School for young men in grades 6 through 12, is committed to educating the whole person. Our rigorous academic and extensive co-curricular program encourages students to develop their spiritual, intellectual, moral, physical, and creative potential, and inspires them to honor the diversity that enriches both our school community and the world beyond St. John's. We challenge our young men to grow in faith and wisdom, to promote human dignity, to act with compassion and integrity, to pursue justice and peace, and to live lives of service to society.” It is important for me to consider this mission as we aim to have honest conversations with inquisitive students and families throughout the capstone process. Launching a capstone course within the framework of our school’s mission adds an important moral element. We will teach the ethics of quality research methods, and also ask the students to frame how their project leads to “service to society”.
There is an abundance of opportunities for capstones across themes and grade levels. Attending the National Capstone Consortium 2019 Summit in Boston over the summer was a wonderful collaboration of educators from public, independent, and faith-based elementary and secondary schools. Teachers, librarians, and administrators came from schools, districts, and institutions that ranged in location from Hawaii to Virginia and everywhere in between. Participants in the National Capstone Consortium 2019 Summit shared successes and failures of the enriching programs at their schools. The “unconference” model of the consortium allowed us to share best practices as we crafted our programs to fit each of our schools, and the conversations were strengthened by the speakers and workshops focused on our changing world, diversity, inclusion, and equity. The summit also helped me to consider more deeply how our capstone course fits with the mission of St. John’s Prep, and what we can do to build networks and relationships for our students and community.
The mission of St. John’s Prep has some similarities to other schools and it is unique to our specific history, place, and school culture. Our school’s mission and leadership emphasize servant leadership, and so the curriculum of our capstone course will reflect this. There is a place in academia to learn for the simple joy of it. Connections to past learning with new ideas allows for curiosity to flourish in the possibilities of the unknown. Fritjof Capra writes in The Web of Life, “all meaningful knowledge is contextual knowledge, and much of it is tacit and experiential.” However, our capstone course goes beyond basic inquiry, as we ask students to connect their own ideas with how they will serve others. There are both philosophical and tangible challenges in our world today that need to be addressed. Too often we look to technology for answers rather than as a tool to help solve problems. Capra continues, “brains seem to operate on the basis of massive connectivity, storing information distributively and manifesting a self-organizing capacity that is nowhere to be found in computers.” As the wider conversation of mechanized industrial-style economics and systems within pop culture wrestle with automation, inequality, and ecological degradation, I hope to highlight for my students that we create ideas and we have the power to act on those ideas. Based on messages that are prevalent in media and advertising it may seem counter cultural to embrace simplicity, compassion, humility, trust, and zeal. But these are the stated values of St. John’s Prep and the Xaverian Brothers Sponsored Schools network. These values will help to inspire us and our students as we work on their capstone together. Having a clear mission and shared values helps me to consider the best ways to facilitate dialogue with students and the content we will encounter. It was a tremendous help for me to have the time and space at the summit to discuss with my colleagues how to articulate the goals of our new Institute for Mission and Research and the Advanced Research Capstone course.
St. John’s Prep has taken a thoughtful step by dedicating time and resources for its mission to come alive in a capstone course for seniors. Juniors must apply in the spring to enroll in this full year senior honors-level course, meet criteria that demonstrate intellectual curiosity and the ability to do independent work, and interview with the directors of the program. The students are informed through the application process that they do not need to have a specific project in mind when they first apply, but with our guidance, they do need to eventually create a research project related to: innovation and design, justice and peace, environmental sustainability, and/or global health and wellness. There is a likely scenario that students choose a topic of interest that is interdisciplinary across these themes, and we encourage that.
At the National Capstone Consortium 2019 Summit, the Tuesday afternoon panel of Directors of Admission from Tufts University, Northeastern University, Boston University, UMass Amherst, Brandeis University, and Clark University gave us candid insight that admissions offices would like to see students and schools more clearly communicate students’ growth achieved via the rigor of the capstone. To provide context, we should share the breadth and depth of student projects with specific graded rubrics that give students feedback and that an outside audience can understand. Providing these metrics isn’t to take away from the importance of the process, but rather, it is meant to clarify where students are on their path of learning. Our students and school counseling office will more easily be able to convey the strength and foundation of our capstone course to college admissions by launching it with a mission that ultimately serves others.
The time set during the capstone consortium summit dedicated for incubation with other schools and team time for our own school gave us an opportunity to discuss the importance of failing fast, reflecting intentionally, and giving students and ourselves the time and space for constructive feedback through a cycle of inquiry. The uniqueness and diversity of the institutions represented at the summit strengthened the conversations to explore what is possible for a capstone course. We discussed the need to foster skills that authentically open students to their own identities, and encourage them to share their full selves as part of a community. We plan to ask our students how they can shift their mindset from “me” to “we,” and take action as they develop a substantial research project that serves the greater good of society. This is developmentally appropriate for high school seniors as they take ownership of being active members of their community, and it is guided by the mission and values that our community already embraces. I look forward to being with the students as they learn from their mistakes and flourish in the process of their Advanced Research Capstone course, and I am thankful to the dedicated educators who made the National Capstone Consortium 2019 Summit possible.
Matthew Spearing, St. John’s Preparatory School, MA
The views of each blog post are the experiences of the individual instructor and school and do not necessarily represent the views of the Consortium