Photos courtesy of Laura Moore
It all began with the ambition dream of recreating Chicago’s Ideas Week. Last year, Upper Arlington created its first annual Idea Day. The event was a major success, as this year the day has grown from being attended by 34 students, to 81 students applying to help plan it alone.
On March 22, Idea Day will take place around the theme “Spark: Finding Inspiration,” but for some high school students, they’re living out the vision and goal for Idea Day on a regular basis.
This past fall, sophomore, junior and senior Upper Arlington students in Laura Moore’s class attended the Columbus Foundation’s The Big Table day. Moore was approached earlier by the school since her class, called an Idea Seminar, was especially applicable to The Big Table’s goal of “Community building through conversations designed to strengthen and connect Columbus.”
At The Big Table, Moore’s students sat next to community members and discussed topical issues to Columbus and it’s surrounding neighborhoods. Gabrielle Shell, one of Moore’s students, felt nervous before the event since she was unsure if adults would take her and her friends seriously. Her nervousness, didn’t last long however.
“I was amazed by how much they seemed to care about three high schoolers opinions” Shell says. “I also realized that students and adults worry about the same issues in Upper Arlington.”
This incredibly positive experience of speaking with and being affirmed by adult leaders was noticed by Moore as well.
“Many of students had shared that they had never sat across from adults who were not grading them, coaching them, or related to them and had a conversation where their voice mattered equally to the adults” says Moore.
As empowered as her students were by The Big Table, she decided to adjust her current courses curriculum to better match the project ideas appearing in student’s minds after the event. Although Moore originally wanted to focus on student engagement in their school, Moore decided to broaden the focus to match her student’s big ideas.
“The purpose of [the Idea Seminar] was to teach public speaking through authentic audience and authentic purpose” says Moore.
After The Big Table, students wrote speeches reviewing their experience to share with event organizers. To Moore, this resulted in an encounter much more true-to-life than writing a speech on a random topic and sharing it with the class. Here, students were speaking to individuals with a vested interest in what they were saying.
As students excelled in this assignment, they moved on to pursue community projects such as a Diversity Festival, a student shadow position for the School Board and City Council, or researching problems they believed evident in their community. To many student’s surprise, solutions to the problems they brainstormed already existed. But this taught them a valuable lesson too.
“The people who show up have a voice” says Moore. “A lot of them are recognizing that there are opportunities all over the place for your opinions to be heard and for your voice to be weighed in on decisions.”
Shell and her friend, Susan Glaser, are seeing through their Idea Seminar project by producing Upper Arlington’s very own Big Table event. Inspired by skills they learned in Moore’s class, such as design thinking, they hope to bond students and adults through communication and problem solving to lead to positive connections and empowering discourse in their community.
Maggie Ash is a contributing writer. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
