All high school students have sat in class at one point or another and asked themselves this fundamental question: "When will I ever have to use this?"
In Nashville, Tenn., students will soon have the opportunity for a more practical method of learning. The Open Source Teaching Project starts with an interview between student and real-world professional and ends with an invaluable resource for public school teachers.
The concept is simple: students need to know how to be successful in the working world, and they often can't get the full picture from theory and lectures alone. Through interviews coordinated by the OSTP, students learn straight from the source, gathering vital insight into their career fields -- a primary resource that is not often found in the public school setting.
This project relies on technology -- digital recorders and free-access Web sites -- to get off the ground. As many teachers would attest, getting a speaker to come in for an afternoon can be harrowing, let alone drawing representatives from an array of career fields.
"We were bemoaning the lack of actual content expertise in the classrooms, especially middle and high school," says David Sevier, cofounder of Sage Leadership Partners, Inc., the nonprofit organization behind the OSTP.
So Sevier and his partner Art Fuller, both policy advisors for the Tennessee Department of Education, mapped out a project that will get experts' ideas into the classroom without leaving the office.
The project pairs college students with real-world professionals -- CEOs, chemists, business owners and so on -- for a 30-minute meeting at the interviewees' place of business. The students, who are prepped beforehand, run the interview session and digitally record the conversation. The audio of the interview then gets uploaded into a free-access database, where it will be open for all to use.
Sevier describes the future home of these collected discussions as a digital database where students and teachers can easily find and share the interviews by typing in a keyword.
Once the interviews have been tagged, uploaded and sorted, the next question is: How can high school teachers use them in lessons? With school funding inextricably linked to test scores and other accountability measures, teachers must stick to curriculum guidelines -- a concept that isn't lost on the founders of OSTP.
"We work with the Metro Nashville school system -- or any school system that chooses to participate -- and get their teachers to craft curriculum around (the interviews)," Sevier says. "Teachers have to teach mandated things. You have to teach this anyway and here is someone in your city who is researching that very topic."
The project, initially funded by Metro Nashville Public Schools, includes $500 mini-grants for teachers who review the database and create lesson plans that incorporate the interviews. These grants are built into the proposal that Sevier and Fuller presented to MNPS -- and they're a sticking point with the district.
"It's wonderful to have hundreds of thousands of interviews at hand, but unless teachers know how to incorporate them into their curriculum it doesn't mean a thing," says Lance Lott, MNPS's assistant superintendent for technology. "The beauty of the proposal is that it talked about how to do that."
The introduction of the open source project has occurred simultaneously with the restructuring of eight Nashville high schools -- a happy coincidence in the eyes of MNPS.
"We are changing out comprehensive high schools to small learning structures. I knew it was certainly compatible with the (OSTP)," Lott said.
The transformation from an all-encompassing environment to specialized programs tailored to each grade level could bode well for changes in curriculum. Some classes will likely be restructured, and building the open source project into lesson plans may be easier if a revamp is already in process.
So when the proposal came through for the project in the summer of 2007, Metro Nashville Public Schools came on board.
It was at this time, before the 2007 school year, that the city of Nashville and the OSTP entered into a five-year community development partnership. Still in its first year, Fuller and Sevier are working on putting together a group of community leaders that would be interested in donating their time to the project.
They have currently identified 30 high-profile business leaders within the Nashville area who've been pointed out by the Chamber of Commerce as candidates. This list includes Karl Dean, the mayor of Nashville, Agenia Clark, president and CEO of the Girl Scout Council of Cumberland Valley, and T.B. Boyd of R.H. Boyd Leadership Society and R.H. Boyd Publishing Corp.
At this phase of the partnership, Sevier and Fuller have also called on area universities to contribute. The project has teamed up with Vanderbilt, Lipscomb, Middle Tennessee State, Belmont and Tennessee State to get interested college students involved.
Benefits for participating college students are twofold. They get to hear exactly what it takes to be successful in their city, and it allows for a personal connection with a subsection of the city's population that can often be inaccessible, such as business leaders, CEOs and members of the local government.
The OSTP is working with the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce to find and contact local leaders that are interested in participating in the project. By working with the city, the goal is to recruit 100 business leaders over a three-year period.
This link between students and city leaders could reduce the possibility of a disconnect between students' ideas of what it takes to live and work in their city and what a potential employer is actually expecting.
As open source teaching was being solidified with the MNPS and Chamber of Commerce, it was also being integrated into area college courses. In fall 2007, Sevier contacted Lipscomb University about partnering with the OSTP.
Christin Shatzer, director of service learning for Lipscomb, said that the program meshed well with the university's curriculum and specifically the service learning requirement for undergraduate students. The university differentiates service learning from volunteerism, as the goals of service learning are both academic and community-oriented.
Along with branching out into the community, Shatzer believes students will gain insight and knowledge about their own area of study.
"It gives students a deeper understanding and deeper interest (in their studies)," Shatzer said.
The Institute of Law, Justice & Society at Lipscomb is already using the open source interview project in classes. While speaking with area experts is beneficial in any field, it is especially pertinent for these students, as they are learning how to influence change through civic engagement, Shatzer says. These students need to see how classroom theory translates into community activism. And for them, the open source project is a way to interact with individuals already influencing change through civic engagement and local government.
Shatzer also points out that Lipscomb students are excited about documenting and keeping oral history of their world as it is today by making that audio available and accessible to others.
While community development through local interviews is a main component of the project, Fuller and Sevier have even loftier goals.
The twosome have been in contact with top experts worldwide, from Nobel Prize winners to Guggenheim fellows to "genius grant" winners of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
The winners of these awards are widely recognized as the authority on their subjects, and by contributing to the project, they could create the makings of a major breakthrough for U.S. schools.
"(We) found winners for the last five years, e-mailed them, and asked to have an interview with them in the next year," Sevier said. "Every response we got was, 'Absolutely, love to help out, just let me know what to do.'"
Sevier says that the OSTP currently has commitments from more than 200 people who are willing to be interviewed, meaning that the open source database will be populated with audio files, even as the project gains momentum.
However, because these top scholars are located worldwide, Sevier and Fuller are recruiting college students far and wide to conduct the interviews.
"We get eight to 15 resumes a day from Stanford, Michigan, Miami, Vanderbilt -- top-notch universities," Sevier said. "People really seem to want to give their time (to this)."
The no-cost availability of resources online could change the face of the American education system. Open source information, such as the Human Genome Project and the resources of the Library of Congress, allows schools access to information, no matter their budget.
As for students, one only has to look at the practicality of the program to see its relevance. After all, gaining insight to their future careers is something they'll undoubtedly use.
*This story is from Converge magazine's Winter 2008 issue.
