Wildly Inclusive ALC is a full-time self-directed education program in Durham, North Carolina, run by the Wildly Inclusive Learning Collective, a nonprofit, with Jr. Explorers and a Teen Innovators program. In its own words, a place where learners explore and learn at their own pace, and a welcoming and safe environment for all, regardless of race, gender, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.
Wildly Inclusive keeps its record in Prism. Between September and July, its five facilitators wrote 406 entries about what happened there, most of them with a photo. This is that year, a month at a time.
Spinning marker art, taken up again for a whole day. A hallway installation of dots, after a picture book they read together. Flowers cut and arranged for the space and as gifts, with a lesson in how to green a vase.
At a surprise puppet show in the auditorium, a puppet tried to eat lunch, and everything in the lunch box kept running away.
On the light table: building together, scrapping the plan, and starting again.
Someone offered a drawing game called Fake Artist. Nobody wanted to be called a fake, so the group renamed it the Blender and played it under the new name. Several rounds, with adjustments as they went for what different players needed.
They invented a new game, then went through every object in the room deciding whether it was safe to play with. The unsafe ones were moved to a no pile.
Back from a surprise visit from the fire truck at the station nearby, they found a salamander standing very still on the walkway, and started working out why.
When players were knocked out of the musical chairs game, they started a second game alongside the first, so it did not have to end.
A facilitator brought in a small stuffed bear that had been run over. For the weeks that followed they looked after it: a hospital went up out of cardboard while the bear was repaired and decorated, and it came out of it with one eye and a pair of crutches. Along the way they talked about not throwing things away, about what an injury changes, and about who belongs to the place. The bear stayed.
A facilitator brought compost from home that had turned into soil, worms and all. Getting used to the worms took a while.
Back from the garden and the field, they emptied a bin of toy bugs, and the bugs became puppets on sticks and yarn. Valentine's cards, for each other and for people they care about.
Waiting to be picked up, they played Bubblegum, the old rhyme for choosing who is it, as a whole game of its own.
A Friday spent at the science museum. Paper planes tested down a hall, the new room of spacecraft and satellites, buildings run up out of wooden planks. The group worked out its own route through the building and took each other's input on where to go next.
Raw walnuts, opened with a lever so both halves of the shell stayed whole, then painted into palm pets. Shakers for the music collection, from cardboard tubes.
Several of them tried to build a cart big enough to ride in. It took more than one attempt.
Burritos: choose your fillings, then get rolled up in a mat. Bird watching from the window.
Before a sword fight, they agreed on the rules, showed each other how hard or light they were okay being hit, and stopped often to check in.
Two learners spent the start of the week acting out favorite Star Wars scenes. They negotiated who played which part and what order the scenes came in, then ran them again.
A Monday in the main classroom: logic puzzles at one table, a textbook read aloud at another, a personal website being built, a map being worked through. All of it at the same time, in one room, chosen by the people doing it.
Over a fortnight a group built a model house out of real wood. They took turns measuring and designing while a facilitator did the sawing and the gluing. Where the stairs should go took a while to settle. The offcuts became furniture, and the plan grew into a ranch with a lot of rooms.
New scooters you ride sitting down arrived for the auditorium, and the games kept coming: trains of riders, then human bowling. A race track that ended in a domino run. A DJ deck that had stopped working, taken apart on the table.
Two rounds of a party game on a laptop. The first was a rap battle written on the spot, which meant rhyming at speed and reaching for metaphors. The second was a pitch contest for absurd inventions, voted on for how funny they were and whether they would actually solve the problem.
At the end-of-year celebration they tried to catch a friend inside one of the giant bubbles. The bubbles weren't quite big enough.
Every member of the community got a Paper Plate Award: a shiny paper plate with a silly title on it, for what they had brought to the place.
entries, written by the people who were in the room.
facilitators wrote them, and no one else.
of the entries carry two or more subject areas in their Learning Signals.
Language arts is the most documented subject of the year, with mathematics and visual arts close behind, and almost all of it arrives inside something else: a card read to work out what it does, a score kept, a five-letter word guessed from clues. The program's own two biggest categories are Offerings, things one person brought and opened to whoever wanted it, and Free Play. Social and emotional learning shows up on more of the year's moments than any other domain, well over half of them.
Every moment here comes from Wildly Inclusive'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 the stories are the Learning Signals Prism found in those entries.
“Prism allows us to easily make visual all the embedded learning happening at Wildly Inclusive. Parents love seeing what learners are up to all day.”
Amber Crews, program director, Wildly Inclusive
An inclusive, affirming self-directed learning community in Durham, North Carolina, for ages 5 to 18.
A year at Wildly Inclusive 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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