By: Brian Counselman
Shabazz High School
If you have driven up Sherman Avenue lately, you have likely noticed a new building in front of Shabazz High School. After years of envisioning, grant writing, planning and multiple stages of construction, Shabazz will have a new outdoor education building to put to use this coming school year. This is an exciting space that will support so much of the outdoor, experiential and project-based learning (PBL) that is at the heart of educational opportunities offered at Shabazz.
This will be a dynamic space that is both functional and inspirational, and will house and consolidate our vans, camping, gardening, outdoor, fishing, paddling, camp cooking, and woodworking gear (currently stored in multiple locations throughout the school) that are critical in supporting our interdisciplinary PBL courses. We hope this will support the next generation of Shabazz staff and students to get out into nature and the community to experience and learn firsthand to make change and grow as humans.
We are excited this new construction will also provide the water and electricity to inspire future outdoor initiatives. We plan to utilize space around the building to create community garden and orchard spaces, in collaboration with the neighborhood, to have a place to share agriculture and culinary traditions and skills. We also have dreams of adding a small greenhouse to provide multiple engaging learning spaces. Finally, we look forward to continuing to cultivate our Shabazz “school forest” as we plant, maintain and restore the south portion of our lot surrounding the playing fields into restored prairie and woodland.
While these outdoor spaces and initiatives are exciting, this new building will also free up an old darkroom space (currently used for storage) to be re-envisioned into a Shabazz “Makerspace.” We hope to renovate this space to help support students’ imagination and projects to explore screen printing, photography, music production, audio recording/production, and whatever else our students can dream up.
We appreciate all the support to help make these new spaces a reality. We look forward to how they will inspire our students through PBL to connect more deeply with their own personal learning, our school culture, and the broader Madison community.
If you have any gear, tools or clothing that is in good shape (i.e. outdoor gear, clothing, tools, audio equipment, instruments, gardening tools, etc.) that you would like to donate to Shabazz, or if you would like to directly donate money to keep building these dynamic experiences for our Madison youth, please contact teacher and PBL Coordinator Brian Counselman at bdcounselman@madison.k12.wi.us.
