One of my favorite movie lines comes from Mel Brooks’ insane comedy Western, Blazing Saddles:

“Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!”

As a longtime unschooler, I’ve encountered people who question if what our family does qualifies as teaching. On the surface, I am pretty far out on the side of do it and they will learn. But just below the surface, there’s much about teaching and learning that I am doing and observing. As a scientist, I like to record, over time, the multifaceted personal development, knowledge and skill acquisition of my kiddo. As an unschool mom, I’m uninterested in grading, I’m interested in curiosity cultivation, joy of learning, and building upon strong foundations of trust and scholarship.

As someone who believes passionately in multi-age experiential learning, I feel an obligation and a privilege to communicate clearly with the other families undertaking this journey with us. It’s exciting to have a technology that sits at the intersection of these diverse needs and goals. It’s called digital badges.

At Forest Grove School we are implementing digital open badges (about Open Badges: text | video) to complement each field class. The badges that may be awarded after a field class speak to the learning objectives met for that class. Everyone taking a class with us is on a personalized trajectory of learning and the badges reflect that learning over time AND serve as a record of learning should your homeschool practice want or need such evidence. In conjunction with our syllabi, these badges also serve as shareable criterion-based markers of learning for college-bound high schoolers’ narrative recordkeeping.

Example: Check out the Mushroom Hunter badge.

We believe passionately in privacy so will not use your child’s name whenever we issue a badge. Instead we will assign a unique ID  number (UID) to your child(ren) and award badges in the name of that UID which are then sent to your email address. If you have attended one of our earlier field trips this year, or are registered for our January trip, emails will go out at the end of this week with these ID numbers as assigned to your child(ren).

Badges are not a replacement for a teacher recommendation letter and we will still offer those per our guidelines.

Have questions? Please don’t hesitate to reach out! I will compile a FAQ from any questions asked and post here.

— Linda

PS: Grownups, you’ll be there too: Let us know if you’d like to be issued a badge!