On a Mission and Unlearning Along the Way- Rebecca Chambers’ P3

Rebecca Chambers is currently a HS Social Science teacher who has been teaching in the Ottawa area for 16 years. She’s on a mission to change the way we do school and has been on her own unlearning journey since she began. This year she has gone to a 100 % passion project based classroom. She tries to provide experiential, hands on learning with a focus on authentic audience. Rebecca is a firm believer in teaching her students to use social media in the classroom to help them have a real-world audience as well as to learn to create a positive digital tattoo.

Rebecca presented at the DigCitSummit, MADPD and Connect this year. She has an honest approach to speaking about the challenges and rewards of converting her classroom to passion-project-driven and the important role of failure in the process of moving against the status quo. She has been blogging and using Twitter to share what her students are doing. “One of the reasons why I started to doing that is...I wanted to capture what it’s all about when you take some of those risks..and showing people that its okay to fail...showcasing the good the bad and the ugly in hope of inspiring others to give it a try and be okay when it’s not perfect.” Rebecca is sharing her work and her message.

Rebecca facilitated a student-led podcast called The Twisted System. One of her students created a theme song, and it was a place to showcase all of the things they've been working on. She brought the pedagogical angles while she called the voices of her students to help ensure their perspective on their learning experiences we represented. It says on the voicEd podcast page: Rebecca Chambers has a dream for her students: to engage them in inquiries and projects that take them beyond the walls of the schoolhouse and the borders of their own thinking. Each Twisted System takes us live into John McCrae Secondary School to discover what this could look and sound like.

Rebecca found it hard to prepare for her P3. “For me, music has always been a part of my life, but I’ve never really been the person who really ever knows the name of the song or who sings it. Ultimately, if I like it, I like it.” She really struggled with the third song that she referred to as the theme song, which was the title of the category of song that came from where this project originated when it was called the Personal Soundtrack. It was great to get her out of her comfort zone like she tries to do with her students. “It made me think about myself, it made me think about my past.” She even had a time with friends when they spent a whole night talking about music and discussing the idea of the show. “I think it’s more than just the actual conversation. It’s been a couple months trying to figure out these songs, and it really allows you to take some time to reflect on lots of different things.”

When referring to her nostalgic song, Rebecca got a little choked up thinking about her childhood and how supportive her family has always been of her. This song reminds her of cleaning their house as a family. Her dad used to put on this album, and she and her sister would pick from the “job jar” before they worked together around their home with this music blaring. “It just reminds me of that time when life was so simple and you could have fun with your family, and it kind of relates to everything that’s gone on in my life with the support that I’ve had from my family.” Here is a quintessential pop song that has reached an even wider audience of all ages since its appearance as the soundtrack of a movie that began as a musical. This is Abba’s Dancing Queen:

Rebecca’s identity song was an easy pick for her once she saw it. “I really loved this singer when I was younger and listened to a lot of his music...It really spoke to me not only about myself, but sort of this passion I have for changing the way that we’re doing things in school. I think it really plays a huge role…I hope that [my students] can leave my classroom feeling the way they talk in the song.” The lyrics say:

Too many times we stand aside

And let the waters slip away

'Til what we put off 'til tomorrow

Has now become today

So don't you sit upon the shoreline

And say you're satisfied

Choose to chance the rapids

And dare to dance the tide.

Rebecca is trying to move away from the status quo in education. She tries to instil that idea in her students in asking them to reach for who they want to be and not sit on the shoreline of their lives, encouraging risk taking to help them achieve their dreams. Here is The River by Garth Brooks:

Rebecca chose a pick me up song that helps her focus on education for her students and for her own children. She has a dream that she is trying to follow that comes with many obstacles and words from naysayers. Her unrelenting determination is fired up by those who try to shed a negative light on her work, and she is ever-more resolved to keep swimming an upstream journey to build new waterways. Here is a song that says so much about her efforts but also helps her feel great. Rebecca spoke about what some of her students experience through their self directed experiential learning projects. She referred to a student who is a self-taught hobby mechanic who has learned many things as he puts together an engine for the first time, and he has become a huge advocate for students and recognizing the need for education to chance and become a more empowering entity for learners. Roar, by Katy Perry, has allusions to many other classic pick-me up songs.

A lot of Rebecca's work can be accessed through Twitter. She blogs about her experiences in her classroom, her teaching philosophy as well as her student’s experiences in their passion-projects on her site unlearnwithus.com. Rebecca is offering a course to support teachers to help them develop the “ tools and confidence to gradually transition from a traditional approach to a modern approach to learning.” Check it out.