Dear Avenues Families,

As an invitation for you and I to reflect upon the innovative projects that are done here at Avenues, let’s center ourselves around this part of our school’s mission statement and my journey in truly understanding it that follows:

“We Will Graduate Students who… most importantly, are architects of lives that transcend the ordinary.”

When I started working at Avenues São Paulo, eight years ago, I used to think that this statement meant that once our students graduate, they would only then go around and become architects of such beyond-ordinary lives. I changed my perspective when I got to Shenzhen, at a Showcase from our Mastery Program. There, I saw a 12th grader’s work in analyzing water quality from the Dasha river, where he published a scientific paper to an academic journal on traces of industrial products and was engineering solutions to filtering these contaminants out, for the purpose of a better integrated river and city life. It was clear to me that it not an accident that he got to 12th grade open to the feelings of others, curious about the fields of knowledge, ready to receive high level texts and 1:1 support from professors and experts in the field with a mindset to taking action. I needed to know more about how our students at their high school years were seeming to already be able to take the lead, like architects, in living lives of impact and meaningfulness.

Where did that capacity to generate purpose and take action come from? I searched our Shenzhen Middle Grades Program, where I saw projects like The World Through our Eyes in Seventh Grade, where our students not only deliver a play, like many other schools do. Instead, they are invited to write their monologues about how they see the world, family relationships and emotions around them, because their voice and their thoughts matter. The result, beyond a fantastic dramatic performance day, is that our students show that they are able to hold a strong creative vision for how their texts but also their performance space should be like and a capacity to join the conversation about the world they’re a part of.

Noticing that students were already engaged with designing meaningful lives by the Middle Grades, I thought that Avenues Shenzhen’s Primary Division must have been the place where students are sheltered, practicing so that later they can start later. Out of many examples that shattered this misconception was the Imaginary Friends project that our First Graders do to start the school year! There, they use their emerging reader powers with help from key books to define what is a good friend, what friends do and say to each other and capture all these insights in their own real model of an imaginary friend. Right from the beginning, they are given the close support and listening from teachers in small classes and the autonomy to understand the boundaries of key real-life relationships that surround us and build the confidence for deciding for themselves what their ideal friendship is.

Where does the training happen, then? Even at our Early Learning Center, I saw how Play was at the center of everything what our students do and how they interact with the world. Play builds not only the social skills of a child but a their curiosity, awareness of their bodies, emotions and that of others. For it to be Play, I learned, a child has to choose to engage. They have to have the voice and autonomy to bring who they are into the Play space and react to the rules and actions of others in a way that continues to build their own sense of confidence.

If it seemed to me that students were building and living lives that go beyond the ordinary at every stage of their lives at the school, it’s because that’s exactly what was happening. How come there’s no training period? This is when I stumbled upon this quote by John Dewey, an American philosopher and thinker for progressive education:

“Education is not preparation for life, it is life itself”.

And that’s when it all fit into its place. What happens at the projects at Avenues is not preparation for a life that transcends the ordinary: it is already living an extraordinary life. Over the years, I have completely changed my mind and understood that more than any other part of the mission, this statement is (and has to be!) lived on an everyday basis by our students. Building lives that transcend the ordinary begins now and it begins at our classrooms.

Pedro Ramos
Academic Excellence Coach
Avenues Shenzhen