Learning Green

October 14, 2011 - The Sustainability Workshop is putting 29 high school students to work on solving some of the world’s toughest problems. Growing the economy while saving the planet: how’s that for a senior project?

The way Matt Riggan tells it, the Sustainability Workshop started over Vietnamese.

Riggan had gotten together for dinner with three friends from his days working at West Philadelphia High School – Michael Clapper, Aiden Downer, and Simon Hauger. Over the years, they’d stayed in touch, getting together for conversations that, often as not, turned to what was wrong with the education system.

This time was different. This time they had gathered to brainstorm alternatives. What would they do if they could build a high school from the ground up? And how, they asked themselves, could they pull it off?

Nine years and a lot of hard work later, the official opening of the Sustainability Workshop at the Philadelphia Naval Yard marked what Riggan and company describe as the first step in answering that question.

On September 6, the Sustainability Workshop launched as a pilot project for 30 kids who will be spending their senior year of high school working on cutting-edge projects focused on green design and construction. Those projects come courtesy of the Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster, an initiative to transform the Navy Yard into an R&D hub for energy-efficient design and building.

An adjunct professor (and graduate) of Penn GSE and Senior Researcher at CPRE, Riggan explains that the workshop grew out of Simon Hauger’s West Philly Hybrid X team, composed of a dozen West Philadelphia High students who designed and built several electric and hybrid cars.

The kids gained the attention of the national media when they won the Tour de Sol (the nation’s largest alternative energy vehicle race) three times, and reached the semi-finals of the Progressive Automotive X-Prize competition. They even got a shout-out from President Obama at a White House speech in September 2010.

But, as Riggan explains, “The real product of projects like the Hybrid X, is not cars. It is a way of learning, and a way of thinking about learning.”

The Sustainability Workshop starts from the premise that school should engage kids by equipping them with concrete skills to grapple with important real-world problems. In this model of teaching, traditional classroom subject matter like science, math, history, and English become necessary tools kids need, and want, to learn in order to solve the problem at hand.

“Our plan,” explains Riggan, “is to eventually grow the Workshop into a full high school. For now, though, we are so excited just to be off the ground, planning the school, developing curriculum and assessments, getting to know more of the folks at the Navy Yard, and connecting with our students and their families. It is a dream come true for us.”

In September, the Sustainability Workshop got word that it was one of 10 finalists in the Ashoka Foundation’s Partnering for Excellence: Innovations in Science + Technology + Engineering + Math (STEM) Education. Winners will be determined in part by popular vote. You can vote for the Sustainability Workshop by clicking here (via Ashoka’s website) or here (via Facebook).

To read more about the Sustainability Workshop, follow The Workshop Blog here.