Explore: Y8, S1, W3

See pictures from Session 1 here.

What makes a community worthy of our trust?

Three weeks into the year, Explorers are moving beyond imagining the kind of community they want and beginning the harder work of building one.

Their Studio Contract remains an experiment. Rather than writing a list of rules and calling it finished, learners have continued testing their promises against everyday life in the studio: Which ones actually help us do our best work? Which need to change? Which are worth promising to one another? Through the Contract Game and this week’s Gallery of Problems and Ideas, Explorers practiced looking honestly at their shared space and proposing ways to make it better.

Trust became especially tangible during Thursday’s Trust Walk. With one fellow traveler blindfolded and another responsible for guiding them safely around campus, learners experienced what it feels like both to depend on someone else and to have someone else depend on you.

That same responsibility shows up in less dramatic ways every day. Explorers considered what helps them enter a state of “flow” during Core Skills, continued experimenting with poetry in Writers’ Workshop, brought community concerns and possible solutions to Town Meeting, and ended the week recognizing specific acts of character they had witnessed in one another.

A learner-driven community depends on freedom. But increasingly, Explorers are encountering the other half of that equation: freedom works when we can trust one another with it.

And trust, like the Contract itself, is something we build through what we do.