Laboratory Schools founder’s vision continues to energize students and teachers
John Dewey’s educational legacy is living in the basement of Judd Hall.
Like other classrooms in the Laboratory Schools, the spaces occupied by the journalism program at University High School are a place where learning means doing. Students don’t just sit through lessons on story writing and page design, they practice journalism and help put out a paper from the first day they enter journalism class.
“We have no text books. Students learn by being challenged,” says veteran teacher Wayne Brasler, who has guided generations of journalism students, many of whom have gone on to distinguished careers in the field.
Being challenged means taking on hard assignments and looking for stories outside the Lab Schools quadrangle at the east end of the University campus. A recent front page piece, for instance, examined the role of teen violence and included interviews with people working on solutions as well as observations from teens who live in neighborhoods plagued by crime.
“I talked to a gang member as well as leaders of a community organization called Ceasefire,” said junior Gabriel Bump, associate editor of the monthly U-High Midway.
Dewey, who founded the Lab Schools in 1896, contended that education should be an authentic experience in which students do not learn about subjects, but experience learning by being involved in activities that stimulate their curiosity and reinforce their learning. Dewey fought against the tedium of memorization and drill. His ideas revolutionized education in the United States and continue to be a source of inspiration for teachers across the country.
For Bump, the challenge of writing about gangs took him into learning more about urban life than he could have picked up from a civics textbook. One gang member he talked with for the story that ran on the Midway’s front page told him he had to follow what his friends’s example. “It’s almost like the culture of the neighborhood,” he said. “When you see people getting into things, they make it look cool. You end up wanting to get into it because it seems like the cool thing to do.”
The hallmark of the journalism program is teaching students how to write about subjects by doing more than collecting and restating a set of facts, said Brasler, who received a distinguished journalism award earlier this year from his alma mater, the University of Missouri. The students look at problems in their entirety, see the human elements and look for connections that reflect a deeper understanding of an issue. The gang story, for instance, was accompanied by another about student safety.
The paper takes on big issues that confront Univesity High School, such as efforts to boost diversity, and doesn’t receive administrative reprimands that sometimes accompany edgy reporting at other school newspapers.
As a result of its independent attitude, the paper creates a buzz around school and in the neighborhood each time in comes out.“We’re a school of 500, but we publish 1,000 copies each month. They’re snapped up at school and parents and shop keepers in the neighborhood ask for more,” Brasler said.
By Bill Harms
