SPRINGHURST QUARTERLY A Publication of Springhurst - The Whole Child School Volume I - - - - - - - - Issue 2 - - - - - - - - - Winter 1997

welcome to the second issue of SPRINGHURST QUARTERLY. Much of this issue is devoted to the topic of curriculum. The goal of the newsletter is to keep our friends informed of our progress and to share our vision. We hope you find it useful and, as always, we welcome any comments, suggestions, or ideas. -ed. Springhurst Online & In Person during the last several months we have been working hard to share information about Springhurst. This newsletter represents just a part of that. Springhurst has its own internet domain (www.springhurst.org) and our web site has been quite busy. It has general information about the school, curriculum information, and links to other resources. We hope that those of you on the internet will check it out from time to time. Once the school year gets going, we plan to have student pages on the web. We also have a brochure available for families who are interested in Springhurst. If you have not received yours, be sure to ask for one. Application information will be ready later this month. One of the best ways to learn more about Springhurst is to attend an informational meeting. Our next one will be held on Monday, February 10, at 7:00 in the evening at the Kirkland Public Library. If you think you may attend, you are welcome to R.S.V.P. at 822-7623 or e-mail us. Future meetings will be announced via postcard and on our web site. We hope to see you on the tenth!

Supradisciplinary Explained we have been asked on more than one occasion to devise another explanation of supradisciplinary. While the word may be unusual, the approach to learning is quite natural. The prefix supra means "over", thus a supradisciplinary curriculum is one that is designed over and inclusive of the traditional disciplines. As learners, each time we receive a new piece of information, our mind finds a way to fit it into our mental picture of the world. We call this a model of reality because none of us (to my knowledge) actually carries the world around in our head. A supradisciplinary curriculum is intended to help students make some sense of information, organize it, and relate it to other knowledge as they build their own model of reality. They'll probably do this anyway, but a curriculum that just divides the world into disciplines makes the world appear in a way that it is not: unrelated and disjointed. We hope this helps, but feel free to ask for more! In Other Words the term supradisciplinary was coined by educator Marion Brady. I thought a few words from him on the subject would be appropriate. This is an excerpt from an article he wrote entitled General Education. These paragraphs about supradisciplinary curriculum supplement my explanation above. The performance such a curriculum permits is in a class by itself. Students are able to move to an entirely different dimension of thought and action (even farther out of reach of our crude tools for objective evaluation). continued on page 2 © 1997