Project Vine, the Alternative Learning Experience at Martha’s Vineyard High School, is pleased to welcome back our community of learners and citizens for another exciting year engaging with each other, our learning and our world.
This year, we’re thinking of all the ways that, like vines, we keep growing. We learn whenever we do something new, which is part of why the staff of this program works so hard to give our seeds fresh soil, like experiences that push students to try new things and see new perspectives.
Already this year, we’ve come back together as a group to reconnect and meet some fresh faces through community building circles, goal setting activities and some interactive group fence decorating as planned by Senior class member, Annie Bettencourt. Junior Marlainey Farrington is hard at work planning a post-card sale that will help benefit a member of our community in need of some financial assistance to purchase a new power wheel chair, while sophomores are busy using our neighboring state forest as their new laboratory.
This fall, we are looking forward to a whole-group overnight at Camp Sassafras in Aquinnah to celebrate our community and push ourselves further into that fertile fresh soil just outside of our comfort zones.
Students are at work designing our new program gear, which will be sold by the end of the fall as well.
Seniors are researching and writing their own “MV Haunted Histories” for a Moth-style creepy story-telling event around Halloween open to our whole community to benefit our little program’s other awesome endeavors.
With so many of these projects, lessons and activities, our focus is growing beyond the classroom walls, as is really the goal of all high school experiences. To that end, we are working to grow the audience of our efforts. Teachers can be great audiences, but they are only human beings and they can’t be perfect judges of all work, though they can be great facilitators, editors, refiners and coaches! This year, Project Vine will feature projects and performances which are meant to be seen and assessed by members of the community other than just our staff. We hope you’ll be a part of the audience when the time comes.
Or maybe you’d rather be a part of our growing community of learners? If you want to engage with your learning and a small, close-knit group of peers and staff as intellectuals and human beings, if you want to count on your voice being heard and ideas being considered in your core academic classes, if you want the chance to shape your education into something more crafted to your passions, if you’re willing to take a risk and be part of innovating what could be the future of
education, give us a holler!
And hey: Welcome Back!