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.

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.
Students built weather balloons and rockets in order to learn more about Astro-photography and Earth Science in an attempt to start their own HTH NASA.
Students created owl boxes for predatory birds to live in near a new building on the HTHCV campus, to learn about the local environment and help deal with the school's rodent problem.

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.

Students ran a political campaign simulation and conducted extensive interviews with people from the community about societal issues so students could learn about these topics both on a macro-level and through personal experiences.
Students critically examined the criminal justice system in the US by working with the California Innocence Project (CIP) to analyze actual clients’ case files and recommend to CIP whether or not to take the case.

Chapter 3: With each other

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

“Do you know what symbiosis is?” reads the first line of the book Evolving Ecologists, ...
Through interviews with family members, scientists, and medical professionals, students homed in answers to the question, "What am I most likely to die of?"
Students read plays by three Greek writers before adapting them into an onstage version following themes of genocide, war, refugees, and the treatment of women.