“Village” Helps Service-Learning and STEAM Thrive at St. Paul School

This article profiles Farnsworth Aerospace PreK-8 Magnet, one of the 25 schools selected to receive funding as part of the three-year Generator Go Green Initiative led by NYLC. A summary report of from the first two years of the program showed the promise of service-learning as an inquiry-oriented method of instruction. In both years, quality of the service-learning experience significantly predicted the extent of change in students’ environmental attitudes, efficacy, and behavior.

The community partners who support the melding of service-learning and STEAM (science, technology, engineering, aerospace, and math) curricula at Farnsworth Aerospace PreK-8 Magnet in St. Paul, Minn. “stand on the shoulders” of a near 20-year history, says Sage Passi, an education specialist with the local Ramsey- Washington Metro Watershed District. Passi should know; she’s been working with Farnsworth — and more than a dozen other area schools — most of those years.

“The school carries the imprint of these previous efforts,” she adds, citing the creativity of Farnsworth teachers and administrators who always wanted to “work outside the box and across subject areas.”

Farnsworth’s service-learning efforts offer a model of the service-learning practice standard for intensity and duration. Students have sustained eight-year efforts to rebuild and replant local lakeshores, for example, offering untold hours of peoplepower.

Service-learning predates STEAM curricula at this inquiry-based school, and has survived changes in administration, the move of a school campus, and dwindling federal, state, and local funding.

Community education, run through the school district’s central office, has provided continuity to the program. In the late 1980s, Minnesota passed legislation that allowed school districts to levy support for youth development staff employed by community education to support servicelearning through trainings and mini-grants — a practice that continues in a number of Midwestern states.

Ginny Newman is a service-learning specialist with community education in the St. Paul Public Schools district office; she has also been involved with Farnsworth for nearly 20 years. Newman says, “Servicelearning is really in the fabric of Farnsworth now.”

Other current partners include HandsOn Twin Cities and the Ramsey County Master Gardeners, who are helping with neighborhood rain gardens and erosion control efforts at the school, and the University of Minnesota Fisheries Department, whose researchers are central to a carp study in local lakes.

Principal Hamilton Bell, who came to the school in February 2012, is the latest in the series of service-learning supporters who have “turned on the light when the lights might have gone out,” says Passi.

“I want to help students achieve at the highest level and want to see them get great jobs in the future,” says Bell, who is intent on helping develop future leaders.

“We value the vantage point of youth in helping change the world,” adds Passi.

Article by Maddy Wegner, it first appeared in the Summer 2012 issue of The Generator.