Melody Compo is a New Yorker, born and raised, but she is no average city dweller. She is paving the way for a future generation to thrive in a newly reformed world that she is helping to create.
Melody spent her years at NYU studying the inner workings of democratic education while simultaneously discovering what creative democracy truly means in our new reality.
“In a republican system, you choose who to represent you because they represent your best interests. ‘Small d’ democracy isn’t about voting, it’s about having a community where each voice is represented as an individual faction; a society that works where every voice carries a certain weight even though it’s not always equal weight that an individual's voice will carry.”
After graduating and struggling to find her path; one random night, in one random New York City bar, destiny played its hand.
Melody ran into one of her college friends from NYU who just so happened to be the director of the Agile Learning Center.
What is the Agile Learning Center, you may ask…
It is the future of learning; the future of creative thinking; and the future of deschooling.
Deschooling is a term that is very prominent in the ALC. As Melody so eloquently explained to me, ‘“schooling and education are two very different things; a lot of schooling is asking what do you want and what do you need to accomplish that? Before ALC, I didn’t often ask myself what I wanted… The whole apparatus of formal schooling answered the question of what do you want for me, until that was no longer a factor... Having to relearn how to ask myself what I want and having that question carry a different weight based on each situation is what it is all about. We school people out of the impulse of desire and even now I am learning how to play again.”
Located on the second floor of a church on 106th street in Manhattan with Community Voices Heard just above them, the building has been standing strong since 1906; their space consists of 7 rooms of a varying sizes.
They are now going strong into their fifth fall semester with a grand total of thirty students. When the ALC first began, they had only six students the very first school year. They pride themselves on being that safe place that students and young minds discover when the rest of the structured and expectant world has failed them.
The way Melody sees it, “you live in NYC, you can do absolutely anything! There are museums, parks, a robot foundry… You name it. So how can we go about setting up clusters of micro schools so that kids feel like they have access to New York while still having a home base in the ALC?”
This is just one of many questions and goals helping to drive the Agile Learning Center’s future ambitions.
Aside from everything else that Melody does for the Agile Learning Center, she is also currently spearheading the new, soon to be, Brooklyn location.
What does a typical school day at The ALC look like?
“Well, self-directed education is the foundation of our entire curriculum; it allows kids to grow up to become adults who are more compassion, empathetic, adaptable, and curious about the world.
Right now our age group ranges from six to sixteen years old. They come in every morning from 9-9:30 for our morning meeting which is called ‘spawn point’. *Noticing my puzzled expression, she continues on* Basically the reason we call it a ‘spawn point’ is as a comparison to a software meeting of sorts that deals with agile software management tools, we transition that to work within a learning community.
The meeting essentially consists of everyone going around and telling the group what they are going to do for the day. They can change their minds afterward, but it’s a community activity each morning and forces them into thinking about what they truly would like to do for just a moment.
The ALC and Politics
“It’s a scary political time right now. We went into school on November 9th and had to explain to an autistic ten year old student why Trump won. I realized that sometimes you just have to say it doesn’t make any sense. It’s a space of extreme vulnerability to put that out there for a kid…
After the election, we talked for over an hour about the ins and outs of how the system works until it got to the point that I was visibly upset and I had to ask the students if we could speak about it later.
The nice thing about having conversations such as this is that it’s an ongoing conversation and it’s a true dialogue. That’s so much more of an important conversation than test prep or something like that.
I feel fortunate to be in that space with kids especially now that the world has turned upside down; I can really prep kids for the real world now and being able to have an ongoing discussion about the context of why things are happening is so important and influential.”
How do the diversities amongst the students and staff better their education?
“With any of the classes or offerings that the students partake in, there is no ‘we don’t talk about that here’ kind of topics. For example, we recently had a gender offering which was truly fantastic!
We have an incredibly diverse group of students from race, age, gender identity and sexuality, so the value of having a space that’s so open is really inspiring. You get to see a lot of different ways of being, so to speak, through multiple different kinds adult models.
One administrator will explain gender far differently than I may which I think is a really important thing for this kids, and people in general, to pull from.”
There is never just one way of being, thinking, or doing. So how does an organization work to cultivate this kind of mentality within their students in a true, lasting way that may eventually reflect in the rest of the world?
ALC meets the student's right where they are. Everything that they do revolves around the idea of choices; from allowing students the freedom to make their own to later reflecting on those choices with them.
By combining these three concepts; small “d” democracy, deschooling, and self-directed education the Agile Learning Center is creating a more creative and developed world for future generations to thrive.
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