Dorcas Olatunji is a sophomore who entered Dual School wanting to address the issue of prejudgment. It’s a giant problem and she wasn’t sure where to start. But after observing the problem in action, she had a realization.
Even though a small group of students share the same homeroom and spend time together every day for four years, they rarely connect with each other. In fact, some people don’t know everyone’s names in their homerooms! Dorcas began to think one reason why people are judging each other incessantly is because they don’t know each other on a deep level.
She saw this as an opportunity to start small and create a model for facilitating connection between peers.
Her idea was to develop activities and questions that could be used in homeroom to bring people together and start meaningful conversations. The best part of this is that last Tuesday, during our Dual School session, she prototyped her idea. She brought together 12 Dual School students and led them through twenty minutes of activities. The whole time she took notes on how she might improve the session and implement it better in an actual homeroom.
That is the purpose of Dual School. Helping students take action and learn from experience. Dorcas has pages of notes and now she’s ready to try this session for a group of classmates at her school. And from what I saw on Tuesday, she’s ready to start conversations and open up the opportunity for students to connect in a meaningful way. If that’s not world-changing, I’m not sure what is.
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