Educating the Whole Child for the Whole World: The Ross School Model and Education for the Global Era

10Choreographing the Curriculum

| 141 10 Choreographing the Curriculum The Founder’s Influence as Artist, Visionary, and Humanitarian Debra McCall Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere. Albert Einstein Courtney Sale Ross envisioned a school that would prepare students for active engagement in the twenty-first century. As an artist, she brought a visual sensibility to this endeavor and often employed imagistic metaphors to convey her vision. In the early years a series of images of a caterpillar’s metamorphosis into a butterfly was mounted in the faculty lounge. Every year or two she would ask where we, as a faculty, thought the school was in the process. This was an apt metaphor for the Ross School. A filmmaker, gallery owner, and curator, Courtney Ross thought in terms of preproduction , production, and postproduction. These phases guided the school’s evolution. Imagination was the core of her inspiration. “Don’t focus on the obstacles; imagine and dream the possibilities,” she would advise her faculty. As a humanitarian, she frequently reminded us why we were involved in this innovative endeavor by quoting H. G. Wells: “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” Ross was to be a prototype of education, one that could be replicated, exported, and adapted to other schools, regions, countries, and populations. It was to serve the common good. Partially borrowing from the Temple at Delphi, “Know Thyself in Order to Serve” became the school’s motto for action. Underlying each of the emergent phases of the Ross School—development of its innovative integrated, global curriculum; creation of a middle school, a high school, and a K-12 program; implementation of senior projects; admissions to institutions of higher learning; the Ross Institute Academy; the Ross Global Academy Charter School in New York City; and Tensta Gymnasium 142 | Debra McCall in Stockholm—rests the vision of an artist and humanitarian who understood that the critical condition of education in the late twentieth century required urgent change. Courtney Ross was able to deliver this change because she generously catalyzed a creative, passionate, and willful community devoted to students’ holistic growth, development, and engagement. This is what she refers to as “educating the whole child for the whole world.” With an impeccably degreed and award-winning faculty that included an ethnomusicologist (Kenneth Sacks), painters (Jennifer Cross and Christina Schlesinger), a 3-D artist (Diane Gerardi), a Romanian spelunker and biologist (Serban Sarbu), a naturalist (Hugh McGuinness), a choreographer and dance historian (Debra McCall), a divinity professor and mathematician (Rick Faloon), an art historian /curator (Therese Lichtenstein), a museum educator (Martha Stotzky), a Shakespearean actor (Gerard Doyle), writers (Mark Foard and Geoff Gordon ), historians (Matthew Aldredge and Carrie Clark), graphic designers (Julie Iden), a wildlife preservationist (Greg Drossel), photographers (Alexis Martino), media theorists (Reggie Woolery and Adele Madelo), an animator (Kerry Sharkey-Miller), a filmmaker (Marie Maciak), an anthropologist (Sally Booth), and an advanced chaos theorist (Gottfried Mayer-Kress), Courtney Ross oversaw the fashioning of a world-class curriculum that addressed how students could excel in the new global landscape. The Ross School’s earliest phase, prior to implementation of the spiral curriculum, was a home-schooling experiment of sorts. With Steven Ross working in Asia, Courtney, their daughter Nicole, and a friend of Nicole’s, Nicky Haramut, traveled to Japan and China. The two girls learned Chinese calligraphy and Japanese dance and visited the great monuments. When Steven fell ill, the family returned to East Hampton, where a few more students joined a small group devoted to experiential study and on-site learning in Greece, London, the Galapagos, and Washington, D.C. From this one grade level emerged the desire and need for a middle school. Caterpillar (Preproduction) Study the past if you would define the future. Confucius Implementation of the spiral curriculum and growth into a middle school was marked by an exciting, dynamic new form in education. This would be a school with a curriculum fashioned by a poet and historian, William Irwin Thompson, and a chaos dynamics theorist, Ralph Abraham. It would be a Choreographing the Curriculum | 143 curriculum rooted in developmental theory, consciousness study, and cultural philosophy. One strand of its architecture was literary and poetic, the other mathematical and operational; the two intertwined to form a double helix of cultural study and mathematical constructs that would cohesively serve as the school’s philosophical DNA. With pedagogical scholars such...