The Dandelion Project is a kids' community space in South Philadelphia that supports kid-led, inclusive, and joyful learning for young people ages 5 to 18. Wild Seeds ALC, its community-centered alternative to school, is at the heart of it.
Wild Seeds keeps its record in Prism. Between September and June, five adults wrote 689 entries about what happened there. This is that year, a month at a time.
A board called the parking lot went up for anyone to suggest an offering. On the first day, everyone did.
The writers worked out what a reader needs to know at each point in a story, then got to work: comics, straight prose, all of it spooky. Three weeks later came the publication checklist. A finished story, which could end to be continued. Understandable to a reader. Proofread with a facilitator. A title and a by-line. An illustration, optional. The zine went to press that week.
A video first, on the forces that balance when a plane is in the air. Then six folds, and predictions on the whiteboard for which would stay up longest and which would go furthest. Then the test flights down the room. At the end everyone made a fold of their own and flew that too.
The tower challenge allowed twenty-five sticks and hot glue. Some designs were pulled apart and rebuilt from scratch.
The flying squad took two buses across the city to the art museum, with agreements made before they set off and held all day. They saw a photography exhibit together, then the teens went off on their own while the rest headed for a ceremonial teahouse. Afterwards: what they liked and did not, and why there is so much nudity in art.
To use the rec room whenever you like, you get certified. The training covered how to look after the supplies, how to reset the room after using it, how to handle game rules and the variations people bring, and a set of agreements about being a good sport. A lot of people got certified that day.
A run of game-rules meetings finished the capture the flag rules. They wrote agreements for referees, and a way to challenge a rule you think is wrong. One disagreement was settled with a compromise.
Knife skills on spicy peppers, the seeds taken out safely, the oven managed by the cooks: jalapeño poppers.
At the park, three of them asked for a meeting to be put on the calendar, so the group could revise two of the capture the flag rules.
An animal welfare fund was running an art contest for young people, and the theme was medicinal and aromatic plants. They chose the animals they wanted to paint, a capybara, a lynx, a tiger, a leopard, and researched the plants that grow where those animals live and what the plants are used for. Then sketches, color palettes, and painting over the Mondays that followed.
The teens' nonfiction club took the economics of the 1950s, a topic one of them proposed. First an article that tells the usual story: the middle class growing, the suburbs, more jobs for some. Then one that showed inequality rising in the same years, unions weakening, and prices setting up the hardship of the decades after. They finished with a film on how the gap between who got the opportunities and who did not laid the ground for the civil rights movement.
The tween role-playing group reset its campaign with a new set of agreements. The teen manga club tried new Japanese snacks every week. A bracelet kit came in, and a morning went to making bracelets for other kids.
They voted to name the comedy magazine after an ice cream machine famous for breaking, because the magazine only comes out once a year.
A volunteer comes on Thursdays to teach knitting. Knit and purl first, on a swatch, to work out the measurements each of them would need for a hat of their own. Learning it was frustrating, and they kept at it. By the end of April two of them had done the arithmetic for stitches per inch on an eight-inch scarf, and were knitting scarves.
When a box of donated dinosaurs arrived, a few of them spent almost an hour voicing them in one long story. Two builders decided their magnet-tile building would break if they moved it, and knocked it down together so everyone could go to the park.
Four square used to end in arguments. After several rules meetings, the kids were refereeing their own games.
On one day in June, comedy club showed its sketch a last time and got its laugh, the theater group ran its own sets, sound and lights, and the young readers finished their last book.
entries, written by the people who were in the room.
people wrote them, in the ordinary course of running the place.
of the entries carry two or more subject areas in their Learning Signals.
Reading and writing are the most documented subject of the year, by a wide margin. They arrive through a book club for the younger readers and another for the older ones, a comedy script, a zine of spooky stories, and letters to pen pals in Texas. Social studies comes next, ahead of mathematics, and the topics are chosen by the people studying them: the spring history course happened because a poll asked what they wanted to know more about. The skills that come up most are communication, collaboration and critical thinking, and social and emotional growth is tagged on most of the year's moments, usually in the same moment as the thinking.
Every moment here comes from The Dandelion Project's own record: the entries its five facilitators wrote in Prism over the year, a photo and a few sentences at a time. The small capitals under each story are the Learning Signals Prism found in those entries.
“It reimagines a report card in a way; that is more about skill development, youth interests and passions, includes SEL skill building, centers youth autonomy, and documents what self-direction in practice looks like in our space.”
Lauren Umlauf, executive director, The Dandelion Project
A kids' community space in South Philadelphia for ages 5 to 18. Wild Seeds ALC is at its heart, with an after-school program, a homeschool co-op, camps and a teen program around it.
A year at The Dandelion Project is one of a series of pages Prism makes with the programs that use it, from the record they keep over the year.
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