we, the wonder people
Launching Our Social Democracy Programming
This past Spring break, We asked the Wonder Kids the same question we are asking our leaders, our teachers, and ourselves in this time:
What does it take to live in peace and freedom?
With fewer adventure-based programs during the winter season, School of Wonder embraces nature’s offering to slow down as a chance to reflect on our broader social and political world. During this time, we conduct research to identify the questions we are collectively grappling with and then find creative, pedagogical approaches for bringing those questions to the Wonder Kids in our upcoming adventures.
Going into this past winter, we felt there was an unprecedented reflection in front of us. On the heels of Zohran Mamdani’s victory in our city, the rising force of fascism in our communities, wars escalating in lands across the world — all alongside the irony of entering the 250th year of the founding of the American nation-state — the context of this moment challenged us with the opportunity to create new curriculum prompted by the following questions:
What does Wonder look like in the times we are living in?
What impact can we create through our programming?
In assessing our values as an organization and planning ahead for our spring and summer programming, it felt clear that teaching — or reteaching, in some cases — social democracy should be a core focus of what we are bringing to the Wonder Kids.
Our spring programming begins with a week-long Spring Break camp. In planning for it, we tasked ourselves with the creation of a brand new Social Democracy Series: five days of camps covering the themes of human dignity and non-discrimination, essential freedoms, the rule of law, and building a social democratic city.
The vision for the curriculum was to introduce to the Wonder Kids the content of the U.S. Constitution and what the Constitution looks like in practice. Through adventures based in the history and tenets of democracy, the camps offer a chance to “play out democracy” and encourage exploring what the possibilities of democracy are and inevitably what are also its limits.
But how Do we do build this curriculum, and where do we begin?
The Wonder Compass from the School of Wonder methodology
In reflecting on this social and political moment, we realized there is perhaps some similarity between the moment the “Founding Fathers” found themselves in then and the moment we find ourselves in today — a world that has lost its way into chaos, a world looking for a compass towards peace and freedom.
Maybe this could be the place to begin, as most School of Wonder adventures do: with a compass.
A mission from the camp, prompting the Wonder Kids to find the lost preamble.
Since the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution could be seen as the Founder’s philosophical compass, we wanted to find a way to translate the densely written concepts of the Preamble into something more approachable to kids. Something that through imaginative and relatable play, they could experience off the page and in their environment.
If the Preamble could come to life and become immersive, then maybe it could also expand, grow, and become relevant to the world the kids currently live in, allowing them to become stewards of the document’s proposed values and bring their interpretation of the values into the future.
At School of Wonder, one way we like to transform a difficult concept or topic into an approachable and immersive experience is to let the Wonder Kids engage with the concept in a new form. In preparation for the the week-long camp, we met as a team and reimagined the Preamble to take shape not just as an written document but also as a song.
On the first day of camp — “The Lost Preamble” — the Wonder Kids were prompted to embark on a mission through Prospect Park to collect scattered pieces of the reworked Preamble (photo left). With all the pieces collected, they would have the full text in hand and a full song to sing.
We didn’t want the Preamble to live only in song form, though, so afterwards, there were additional missions encouraging the Wonder Kids to continue looking at the Preamble with new perspectives, to see it through as many lenses as they could.
What would happen if they watercolored the Preamble? What about a live performance?
These expeditions led them through several historical landmarks throughout the park — the Abraham Lincoln statue, the Marquis de Lafayette statue, and the Maryland Monument, the latter of which was a site where the Revolutionary War physically took place. At these sites, a Wonder Leader is overheard asking:
“I wonder how these trees around us protected the army then. I wonder how they protect and teach us now.”
This balance between the imaginative and the real and historical can make space for the way the Wonder Kids bring the past into the present and imagine a new future. The historical moments these monuments enshrine were a long time ago but not so far away when we really look around and notice their meaning today.
We saw this theme come to life in a moment between two of the Wonder Kids upon receiving the mission to find the Preamble. One kid said: “If we find these pieces, we can bring peace and freedom in just one week,” the excitement pouring out of her like hope. Next to her stood a kid, confused by her perspective.
“Well maybe not,” he said. “Iran is in war. This mission is not going to solve that war.”
The first kid wanted to believe that through finding the pieces of the Preamble, the larger world could live together in peace and freedom. And when we weren’t able to find all the pieces, resulting in an incomplete Preamble, we found ourselves face to face with a kind of chaos and a new task at hand: how do we live not just live together in peace and freedom, but also in chaos?
“Sitting with chaos is going to be part of this, huh,” a Wonder Kid said when we arrived at an overlook of the Prospect Park Boathouse. As ducks glided across the water of the lake, ripples trailed in their wake.
On our adventure in search of the lost Preamble, we found something more connective than a complete document: learning how to create our own words and our own expressions for how we want to build a foundation for the kind of community we are creating together at School of Wonder. It may not be possible to find peace and freedom in a week, but a ripple was created on the first day of the Spring Break program that set us up to wonder how to continue creating a social democracy from what we know and what we wonder.
