Author: Dawn Rubbert
From the New York Times “”Humanitarian Design Project Aims to Build a Sense of Community” by Alice Rawsthorn, October 23, 2011. Seems a good story of peace…
On her first day as a teacher at the Bertie Early College High School in Windsor, North Carolina, Emily Pilloton asked the students to name the last thing they had made themselves.
“It could have been something as simple as cookies for their moms, but some of the students couldn’t remember ever making anything,” she recalled. “They’d never held a hammer or taken an art class. Half of them didn’t even know how to read a ruler.”
There were 13 students in the class, all 11th graders. Some came from middle-class families, and others lived in poverty, including a 17-year-old who was struggling to raise a 4-year-old child. They had all signed up to spend three hours a day on Studio H, an experimental design course run from a converted car body shop near the school.
The course started in August last year and ended this month with the opening of the Windsor Super Market, a farmers’ market housed in a wooden pavilion that the students had designed and built themselves.