The Rochester Youth Climate Leaders are back in action! After giving all of the members the chance to settle into their new school year, the eager group started their monthly meetings in October. At this meeting, Ryan McMullan, RIT graduate student and Rochester People’s Climate Coalition intern, shared his current...
Anneke Nordmark decided that it was a good plan to take her homeroom of creative and intrepid 6th graders down to the Project Space one morning a week to get them busy working together–thus Maker Mornings were born. This plan coincided perfectly with the addition of our Designer in Residence,...
Please welcome Kyle Graves to the Commons team as our Designer in Residence for the month of November. As we have a great wealth of shop equipment, tools, and technology in the Workshop and Project Space, it is an excellent turn of events that we have identified someone with exactly...
We were honored to host three guest panelists from the Gay Alliance’s LGTBQ Academy and moderator Jeanne Gainsburg at our October Commons Speaker Series presentation. The evening was designed to better familiarize audience members with transgender identities and to offer a comfortable space to ask questions and learn about respectful...
During the week of October 17-21, we were honored to have two visiting experts on campus to discuss the broad topic of gender. This coincided well with the Oct. 19 Commons Speaker Series presentation featuring a panel on transgender identities, but allowed the faculty to engage Milena Novy-Marx and Pamela...
Kicking off this year’s Commons Speaker Series was none other than the community-oriented, artistically-gifted, show-up-and-make-things-happen spokesperson, Shawn Dunwoody. Shawn has connections to Harley that go as far back as working on the Bridges project with Chris Hartman and Horizons graduates and Harley Upper School students (building boats and understanding), as...
Embarking on our third full academic year in the Commons means the addition of new classes and evolved approaches. Seth O’Bryan, co-teacher of the new Sustainable Systems course (co-taught with Chris Hartman) offered this introduction and scope for the course. “What does sustainability mean? Can it be used as a...
In Mrs. Rivers’ seventh grade science class, the students took their study of human anatomy to the macro level! To apply their learning about how the bones, muscles and tendons all work together in human hands, the three different classes worked to create three larger-than-life, fully operational left hands. The...
Become What Thou Art–by Larry Frye This trimester, the 9th grade Rights and Responsibilities class worked with the community organizer and artist, Shawn Dunwoody. The passionate and energetic artist was recently in the news for his mural project at the Rochester Public Library. With Shawn, the class designed two musical...
At the end of May, we were honored to have Harley alum Karin Deutsch Karlekar (’89) on campus as our final Commons Speaker Series presenter. Karin is the Director of Free Expression Programs at PEN America, and she worked previously at Freedom House; both organizations used her to address free...
