In Ohio, A Capital City Starts to Connect Its Own Dots

By: Sam Chaltain

Of all the sciences, archaeology is the most destructive — and the most vital to the humanities. 

That’s why Annalies Corbin fell in love with it.

As a child growing up on Texas’s gulf coast, Corbin wandered the outdoors like a feral explorer. “We played with whatever we found,” she explained to me recently. “Bugs, snakes, possums. If we found it, we interacted with it.”

Unfortunately, Corbin’s thirst for knowledge was not satiated by her local school district, so her parents — both teachers — enrolled their daughter in community college classes when she was still in middle school. By the time she did reach college-age, as Corbin put it, “I was cycling through all the majors, traveling down every rabbithole I could find, until finally my parents told me I had to choose. 

“Pick the one you find the most interesting,” they said. 

For Corbin — thanks to “Crazy Uncle Jim” — that meant studying to be an archaeologist.

He was one, for starters. At their Sunday family dinners, Uncle Jim would arrive with an armful of paper bags, each containing artifacts from somewhere far far away. “He’d pull all these different things out, and then he’d tell us elaborate stories about them. But I feel like what he was showing me was the science of how to take any topic and really excavate it.”

For Corbin, whose alert eyes give tangible form to her inner drive, it was what she’d been looking for. So she became a maritime archaeologist, studying shipwrecks, and learning about the standards of teamwork and intentionality her chosen field required.

“The minute you open up a site to investigation,” she said, “you start irrevocably altering it. Once oxygen enters an environment that has been completely closed, everything starts to decay. So to excavate a wreck properly, you need to take your faunal people. You need your chemists and your structural engineers, your anthropologists and your historians. Because you’re only going to get one shot at it, and you have to get it right.  

“When you think about it,” she mused, “it’s the exact opposite of traditional education. That’s why we’re trying to do something different here in Columbus.”

Indeed, in an evolving partnership between area schools, local businesses, state policymakers, and civic allies like Corbin’s PAST Foundation (Partnering Anthropology with Science and Technology), Ohio’s capital city is trying to implement what it’s calling the Columbus EcosySTEM, and demonstrate what a completely different approach to education would look like — a collaborative endeavor in which the community is the campus, learning happens anytime and anywhere, and just about every familiar notion of the thing we call ‘school’ gets reimagined for a changing world.

“Traditional schools are not transdisciplinary,” Corbin explained while a group of students outside her office worked on 3D printers. “It’s rare we encounter a course that pulls several forms of expertise together. It’s just not the way we’ve structured ourselves. But we’ll never answer the bigger questions within the structure of a system so tightly wound it can’t even solve its own problems. 

“How do we get around that? In Columbus, we’ve decided it’s by leaving behind the notion that school is a single place. Learning doesn’t work that way. Life doesn’t work that way. So if our goal is to link learning to life, we need to stop building comprehensive high schools, and start building learner-centered ecosystems.”

If you ask National Geographic (and I did), an ecosystem “is a geographic area where plants, animals, and other organisms, as well as weather and landscapes, work together to form a bubble of life.”

Every part of an ecosystem depends on every other part. 

They can be large, like a rainforest, or small, like a tidal pool. 

But they are always defined by the interplay between their living (biotic) organisms and the physical (abiotic) environment that houses them.

What, then, is a learner-centered ecosystem?

For that question, I left NatGeo behind, and turned instead to Education Reimagined, a DC-based organization that believes adopting a truly ecological approach to learning just might be the big idea America needs to change the story of how we all live and learn.

According to their CEO and co-founder, Demi Edwards, a learner-centered ecosystem is “a new way to organize, support, and credential learning. It’s designed to enable and support the learning journeys of every child. And it’s structured to connect spaces and experiences throughout the community in ways that can tap into a wide diversity of societal, community, and employer opportunities.”

Unlike traditional systems, which are built on hierarchy, compliance, and standardization, learning ecosystems are intentionally designed to be adaptive, responsive, and regenerative. “A Learner-Centered Ecosystem is initially built with the creative assets already present in a community,” Edwards said, “and then over time that community can add, prune, and adapt learning opportunities in response to the needs and aspirations of the people who live there.”

It sounds great, but what does it actually look like in practice?

I spent a week in Columbus to find out, with a restless maritime archaeologist as my guide.

“Long before the advent of literacy,” writes cultural anthropologist Keith Basso, “places served humankind as durable symbols of distant events, and as indispensable aids for remembering and imagining them.” 

Place, as Archytas put it, “is the first of all beings.”

To understand any learner-centered ecosystem, then — and discern what its biotic inhabitants are up to — one must first understand the wisdom of its particular abiotic place. And when it comes to Columbus, there’s a lot of wisdom to call on.

It’s the 14th largest city in the United States, with a metro population of almost three million — and growing. It’s home to Ohio State, a “R1” research university. It comes with all the trimmings of a state capital. It’s host to a diverse and active business sector. And it’s already filled with established, beloved area schools — one of which Marcy Raymond founded.

A chemist by training, with a warm, intelligent face, Raymond became an educator when she realized she didn’t like standing at a lab bench by herself every day.“I needed a more social environment for my work,” she explained, “so I started teaching high school, where I quickly learned the traditional ‘sit-and-get’ style wasn’t going to cut it.”

In response, in 2006, Raymond founded Metro Early College High School. That same year, she met Annalies Corbin and found a kindred spirit for thinking differently about the nexus between a city and its schools. 

“The way it used to be,” said Raymond, “everybody went along the same path, in the same line, in the same building. But the way Annalies and I have always thought about education is that it should be more like a spider web, where there are lots of paths a student can take, and where no one journey is going to look like any other.”

So Corbin and Raymond started connecting Columbus’s many civic dots. They partnered with businesses that wanted to address the disconnect between what they needed in their future employees and what students were actually learning (or not learning) in schools. They got kids out of their school buildings and into real community-based work. They pushed them onto college campuses long before they were even high school graduates. They lobbied for changes in state policy. And they slowly wove a web in which the points of connection were no longer merely neighborhood schools, but instead a network of three new concepts: Learning Hubs, Field Sites, and Home Bases.

I asked Marcy how it was supposed to work.

“A Home Base is a safe space where each student’s learning journey gets planned and nurtured over time,” she said, “and where kids can rely on a steady group of peers and advisors. It’s not like a traditional homeroom, where kids could expect to be for fifteen minutes before hearing announcements and going to their next class. We don’t want that. And so a Home Base can be almost anywhere in a community —  in fact, the more different places, the better.”

By contrast, Raymond envisions Learning Hubs as places that provide a developmentally appropriate, dedicated social space for learners to develop their competencies and sharpen their interests. “I think it’s really important that when we talk about a Learning Hub,” she said, “we’re talking about that dynamic social interplay between what students need to know, what they already know, and what they want to do with that knowledge as a result. So if you think of the pieces of a web as the learning journey and all the patterns that go into making it, a Learning Hub helps inform the way the student maps the path — and the work that’s required to find success.”

Finally, a Field Site is a commercial, public, or not-for-profit organization that has agreed to help students go deep on the things they’re interested in. “A Field Site is where kids get their hands dirty,“ Raymond explained. “It could be a workplace, a farm, or a private home — and yes, it could still be a school. But the whole point is to ensure that school isn’t just in the classroom, and that all work has a real social purpose to it.”

As Corbin explained in her book, Hacking School, “we’ll know our vision of this ecosystem has fully arrived when a stranger drives into town and asks a local: ‘Hey, where’s the high school?’ Only to have that person ask, ‘Which part? Are you looking for the kids interested in healthcare? They’re working at the local hospital. Are you looking for the young computer scientists? They’re interning at the cybersecurity center. Are you looking for the kids interested in architecture? They’re the ones out building a bridge across the river.’

“That’s where we want to go with this,” she added, amidst the din of a hundred students surrounding her in PAST’s 30,000 square foot facility. “And we’re getting closer all the time.” 

If they are getting closer, it’s clear PAST is a driving force of that progress. Housed in a former loading dock across the street from Metro High, PAST’s space is bright and airy, with a large open central space ringed by five Learning Labs with windows as walls and giant garage doors.

A partially-assembled Honda DMX is parked in the front Atrium — they, too, are a corporate partner — along with a horse skeleton wearing a top hat. On the morning I was there, students arrived from across the city and fanned out across the space in small groups, laptops open.

One of those students, a senior named Sanju, tucked herself into the chair next to mine to work on essays for her college applications. I asked her to describe the significance of this place. “At my high school, it’s just classes. PAST is where we branch out.” 

To date, nearly three million Columbus kids (and more than 20,000 educators) have participated in at least one of PAST’s 600 programs, which have unfolded at more than 120 different locations. “What we’re trying to do is get the ‘traditional’ out of high school,” explained Kathy Wright, a longtime public school educator from Cincinnati who now works at PAST. “Innovation is hard in systems. We have to become more agile. And we have to help kids experience different pathways. You can want it, but if you can’t see it, you’re never going to get it. So we help kids see it. 

“It’s that easy — and that hard.”

It’s also not the sort of thing any organization can do alone. So we traveled across the city to see what else kids were seeing and doing.

At Mezzacello, an urban farm housed on the land of a formerly abandoned house, anyone that’s interested will discover an integrated wonderland of seven enclosed and interdependent ecosystems — from formal gardens to a thriving fish pond to the most elaborate composting arrangement you’ve ever seen. “And all of this runs on solar,” explained its founder, Jim Bruner, “and is completely off the grid.”

Wearing a green felt cowboy hat, jeans and a bow-tie, Bruner is the kind of person every community has, and few take advantage of. “I’m into sustainability as a cultural model,” he told me, “and teaching what it really means, and what it really requires.”

In a separate section of the city, thirty students at Herbert Mills Elementary were waiting expectantly for the start of their Science of Fragrance workshop. It’s sponsored and organized by Bath & Body Works, which is headquartered here and which, like most area businesses, sees a disconnect between the sorts of people it wants to hire and the sorts of students traditional schools are graduating. So they co-designed a series of STEM workshops with PAST — they call them Portable Innovation Labs — which are staffed by company volunteers across ten one-hour sessions. 

“There are different programs for different grades, so kids can get the widest possible range of work-based STEM experiences,” explained one of the instructors, Elizabeth Colby. “I’m a chemical engineer, and a lot of times when people think of STEM, they think of old white men. Obviously, I’m not old or a man, so I break that stereotype. It’s a way of saying to them that this is a field for everyone, which is super important.”

Meanwhile, across town at one of the city’s comprehensive high schools, Lewis Christian has prepared a very different kind of lesson. “We’re working on tires today,” he tells the seniors who slowly file into a corner of the school’s basement that has been turned into an impromptu repair shop.

Like Colby, Christian is not a teacher in the classical sense; he’s a lifelong automotive technician who works at the nearby Honda plant. But, as he describes it, “Honda is struggling to attract good technicians, so they paid for all this equipment, and then they asked if any of us wanted to teach a bunch of high school kids how to do the work that we do.”

For Christian, a fit 58-year-old with close-cropped salt and pepper hair, it’s been a life-changing experience. “My friends were like, ‘What are you doing? Have you heard about what’s happening in high schools?’ But this has really been a breath of fresh air for me. It’s been an emotional, super-cool journey. And come on! You see that ‘66 Corvette sitting in our repair shop? That’s cool.”

It’s true — a light blue beauty sits atop an elevated platform in a spacious room filled with cars in need of attention. “We’ve got a couple of things going on out here,” he tells his students, all bedecked in protective goggles. “We need to change these tires. And then we’ve got an Acura out here with a brake noise, so we’re going to run a full inspection on it.”

Outside the classroom, a flyer describes the Automotive Pathway in greater detail, alongside its four-year curriculum of courses. “Hands-on experience is necessary for careers in the automotive industry,” it reads. “Students will learn and apply the necessary technical and academic skills to diagnose, repair, service, and maintain all types of vehicles. With the opportunity to earn certifications and college credit, students have a jumpstart on their futures.”

It’s all just so practical — a welcomed return to Vocational Education, perhaps, after the all-consuming fever of “College for All” has finally broken. But maybe the bigger point is that it’s all just so diverse — all these possible pathways kids can gain access to, play with, and embrace or reject. 

From car repair to composting, and aviation to A.I. 

Unquestionably, a big reason for that is the policy landscape in Ohio, which is providing a useful model for how states can free up educators and kids to pursue a wider range of learning pathways. 

Marcy Raymond had a share in that work as well; in 2006, she helped lead an effort to allow high school students to earn college credit for free while in high school. Ohio has also combined its Departments of Workforce and Education into a single entity, and created broader conditions to allow for more learner-centered approaches, programs, and partnerships — from adopting whole-child and personalized learning frameworks to incentivizing work-based learning opportunities.

And while there’s still more work to be done, the primary obstacle — the one Marcy Raymond and Annalies Corbin are most concerned with eradicating — is not about policy, but perception. “There’s nothing that says you have to teach this way,” Raymond said impatiently. “There’s nothing that says you can’t prioritize your relationships with students and have a learner-centered environment. There’s nothing that says your ecosystem has to be static. Your union contract does not say that you can’t teach differently.”

Still, Corbin realizes that she and her colleagues are playing a long game. “True culture change is a three, five, or seven-year endeavor,” she observed. “So this is going to take some time. But every community needs someone who wants to spend the majority of their time coloring outside the lines, and allowing everybody else to come along and find their space within this ecosystem. 

“In America, an 8, 18 and 80 year old are never all together. This has a chance to be a meeting point of the generations.”

This is also still largely an idea — a nascent weaving of people and programs into something significantly different than before. And chances are if you visit Columbus anytime soon, no one will dependably direct you to the nearest Home Base, Field Site, or Learning Hub. 

Lexicons take time to be absorbed, after all, let alone new social configurations.

And yet if you ask the young people who are already a part of this citywide web, you won’t need to wait for stories of impact. “In the beginning,” Sanju explained to me, grateful for a break from her essay writing, “I was forced to come here. But then I created my own internship from scratch, and I learned so much, not only about my possible careers and passions, but also just what makes me laugh. 

“I’ve had to learn how to speak to so many different people. I’ve had to learn what to wear in a professional setting. I thought of myself as this quiet, introverted person. And then I ended up MC’ing the graduation ceremony at my internship. 

“I learned that the workforce isn’t just one thing — and that you don’t need to pick just one path. And now I know I can do anything.”

Sam Chaltain is a writer, filmmaker and global design consultant dedicated to advancing people’s understanding of the future of learning — and what it can tell us about the future of humanity.

Originally published on Letters from the Future (of Learning).

Education Reimagined is partnering with Sam Chaltain to author a series of pieces elevating the development of learner-centered ecosystems in communities across the United States.