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Changing the Subject

Welcome

Of the thousands of projects High Tech High teachers and students have undertaken since the first school opened in 2000, the fifty documented in this book and website are a mere sampling; we hope they provide inspiration and a starting place for many more creative iterations.  We curated them by asking current and former teachers (now numbering in the hundreds) to nominate work that was both inspiring and replicable.

Our purpose is to share highlights from High Tech High’s first twenty years.  In doing so, we aim to describe, not prescribe.  “This isn’t how to do it, it’s how we did it.” 

“Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the relentless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.”(Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 53)

Chapter 1: Invention and reinvention

In these projects students and teachers are creating something new in the physical world.

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Bubbles in Space

50 high school juniors collaborated with a local musician and film director to create a music video for the song, “Bubbles In Space” by Mike Andrews.

The Blood Bank Project

Students worked in groups to research and define an aspect of blood physiology, blood banking, or blood-related diseases before creating multimedia art pieces using what they had learned.

Staircase to Nowhere

Students created art pieces and accompanying posters inspired by the quote “If a staircase goes somewhere, it is craft; if it goes nowhere, it’s art.”

Chapter 2: In the world, with the world

In these projects, students are understanding the need for change in their world and making that change, through service or community action.

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Stars in the Parks

Students explored how people use parks to connect to themselves, each other, and to nature while also learning about the stars on trips to these parks.

The Bee Project

Students investigated the role of bees in our ecosystem, the various ways bees are being threatened, and wrote and performed plays about some aspect of what they had learned.

Logs of the San Diego Bay

Students wrote pieces of poetry and conducted interviews to be included in different field guides about the San Diego bay.

Chapter 3: With each other

In these projects, students are investigating their beliefs and relationships and changing them.

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Reading Buddies: the Children’s Literature Project

11th graders were each partnered with an elementary student as a "reading buddy" to help them grow as a reader and write their own stories.

In Sickness and in Health

Through interviews with family members, scientists, and medical professionals, students homed in answers to the question, "What am I most likely to die of?"

Model United Nations Trade War

Students played a game called MUN Trade War, where they used math to model economic and military avenues of international engagement.
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