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A group photo from the Foxfire course

While visiting the United States this summer, Sara Lam and I had the opportunity to participate in a week-long training at the Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center in Southern Appalachia. The center is located on Black Mountain in Mountain City, Georgia. Foxfire was originally the name of a class that was started in 1966 by a teacher at a nearby high school who experimented with different teaching methods in his English classes. His students began writing and publishing a magazine that included stories and information they collected from their communities. The magazine, also named Foxfire, was well received in Appalachia and the country at large and subsequent best-selling books were released cataloging articles from the magazine. Some of the royalties money was used to buy a large plot of land where the Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center is now located, a decision made by students from the Foxfire classes.

While the Foxfire class and magazine continue to operate in a nearby school, Foxfire has become more than just a class for students. In the mid-1980s, the Foxfire team started teacher outreach programs to disseminate their methods to schools outside their region. They created training courses at their center for teachers and administrators to learn about the methods and theories behind their magazine class. Coupling the experiences from their classroom and the educational theories of John Dewey, they created a curriculum based around core practices. These practices promote the creation of student projects beyond the original magazine class to all different types of student-centered community projects.

Visiting the Foxfire Center and participating in the course was a hugely educational experience for us. The content of the course was especially relevant to our work because community service projects and community research are a large part of the curriculum we’ve been developing at Guan Ai Primary School this last year. We were able to use the time to reflect on our past projects in terms of the core practices developed at Foxfire in order to improve them and come up with new ideas for this year. Some of the core practices refer to areas that we need to improve on in our current community projects. For instance, in the Foxfire method on-going reflection, assessment and evaluation are very important. In the class we were given examples and materials that explain how this can be more fully integrated into a project.

In addition to the lessons on teaching methods, we also gained some valuable insights for RCEF as an organization that hopes to expand. The Foxfire approach was developed in a rural school and distributed successfully to diverse educational contexts, something that RCEF hopes to do in the future. They have forty years of experience on RCEF and myriad experiences and insights from going through the scaling up process. Thankfully, the organizers of the course were willing to adapt the structure of the class to allow us to learn more about the processes involved in building a national program out of Foxfire. This partnered with all of the new insights into teaching made it an incredibly valuable trip for RCEF.

View the rest of the post to see the Foxfire Core Practices.

Core Practice #1

From the beginning, learner choice, design and revision infuses the work teachers and learners do together. Learners’ interests and concerns guide all decisions. Most problems that arise during classroom activity are solved in collaboration with learners, as learners develop their ability to solve problems and accept responsibilities.

Core Practice #2

The work teachers and learners do together clearly manifests the attributes of the academic disciplines involved, so those attributes become habits of mind. Through collaborative planning and implementation, students engage and accomplish mandated curricula. In addition, activities assist learners in discovering the value and potential of the subject matter, including connections to other disciplines.

Core Practice #3

The work teachers and students do together enables learners to make connections between the classroom work, the surrounding communities, and the world beyond their communities. Learners’ work will “bring home” larger issues by identifying attitudes about and implication of those issues in their home communities.

Core Practice #4

The teacher serves as facilitator and collaborator. Teachers provide curricular “givens” then attend to each learner’s developmental needs, monitor each learner’s academic and social growth, and lead each learner into new areas of understanding and competence.

Core Practice #5

Active learning characterizes classroom activities. Teachers and learners manage the learning process, posing and solving problems, creating products and building understandings. Because learners engaged in these kinds of activities are risk takers operating on the edge of their competence, the classroom environment provides an atmosphere of trust where the consequence of a mistake is the opportunity of further learning.

Core Practice #6

The learning process entails imagination and creativity. Classroom activities encourage learners to express and explore, to observe and investigate, and to experience the affective “tingle” which, in turn, leads to durable learning and a continuing thirst for understanding.

Core Practice #7

Classroom work includes peer teaching, small group work, and teamwork. Every learner is not only included, but needed. In the end, each can identify her or his specific stamp upon the effect. In the process, learners acquire the knowledge, skills and dispositions needed to fulfill roles in society that require collaboration and cooperation.

Core Practice #8

Work intended for audiences the learners want to serve or engage evokes the best efforts by the learners and provides feedback for improving performance. An audience may be another individual, a group, another class, organizations, or the community.

Core Practice #9

The work teachers and learners do together includes rigorous, ongoing assessment and evaluation. Teachers and learners employ a variety of strategies to demonstrate their mastery of teacher and learning objectives, which then guides subsequent work toward higher levels of achievement.

Core Practice #10

Reflection, an essential activity, takes place at key points throughout the work. Teachers and learners engage in conscious and thoughtful consideration of the work and the process. It is this reflective activity that evokes insights and gives rise to revisions and refinements.

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