Genevieve Leslie

“This SEL in Action award will provide the material support in helping us set up a Wellness Maker Bar at Oakland International High School. Our students are all recent arrivals to the U.S., and setting up this community maker space will give them access to participating in powerful making experiences that are designed to promote belonging and purpose for our English Language Learners through encouragement, shared responsibility, respect, persistence, and collaboration. This idea to set up a school maker space emerges out of our fellowship work with Agency by Design Oakland. Through this professional learning community, we are learning how to adapt maker-centered learning in ways that support equity, student success, critical thinking, joyful school culture, and a shift to learner-driven practice. To set up this maker space, we hope to purchase materials for a whole-school "Restorative Restart" and scale five innovative community-making projects so that they could be implemented in every Advisory for the 2022-2023 school year. These community-making activities are a reiterative synthesis of two maker-centered learning projects, which provided structured academic and socio-emotional supports to newcomer students in their growth as community members. For this scaled project, we will also set aside a budget for a final (sixth) community-making experience for advisory, which will ask advisors and their student advisees to work together to design their own community-making experiences.”