For many years before our four rural school districts in Mendocino County, California, created the North Coast Rural Challenge Network, we were making systemic changes to improve the learning for all students. Realizing that schools and communities had to develop new relationships in order to meet the demands of the 21st century, each district was collaborating extensively with its community and with business partners both inside and outside the area to address educational, environmental, and economic changes. Our students were involved in projects that connected with the world outside the classroom. Classroom walls dissolved, bringing students and teachers into extraordinary relationships with an ever expanding learning community.

Our common concerns and educational commitments brought us together to develop the North Coast Rural Challenge Network. We brought teams of teachers, administrators, parents, and students from our four rural school districts together to discuss the many exciting benefits of an expanded collaborative community. Our planning meetings allowed us to learn more about the reform efforts of each district, innovative projects or programs at each school, the areas in which we have been unknowingly overlapping, and quickly evolved into discussions of the importance of formalizing a process through which we could learn from and support one another on an ongoing basis.

Our approach is both high tech and high touch -- built on a commitment to lasting relationships and woven together with the fiber of telecommunications that allows us to transcend the twisting mountain roads between our rural communities.

A network is a pattern of relationships that connects multiple nodes or centers to many other centers. In systems thinking, it may be diagrammed as a set of feedback loops that shape the behavior of the system as a whole and the emergence of new capabilities. The activities of a network increase social capital in a community--the foundation of trust and goodwill that lead to collaboration for mutual benefit, innovation and shared risk-taking. A community network like NCRCN is characterized by five key organizing principles:

We used the principles of ecology and community articulated by Fritjof Capra of the Center for Ecoliteracy to guide the development of project-based learning in each of our locations, linking diverse initiatives into a more coherent whole. The overarching goal is to build a solid infrastructure that will strengthen all our schools and communities. Ecoliteracy uses an ecological model to create educational reform that is responsive to an ever-changing community and is sustainable over time.

Responding to the needs identified by our four communities, we chose the theme of “Our Bioregion” as a framework for developing our ideas about collaboration. A bioregion is an area's natural history, human history, and human impact on geographical location over time. This theme allows us to continue and integrate our ongoing acclaimed projects such as the Earth Stewards project and the Windows to the Future project while embracing new projects. Earth Stewards links ecology, community and culture in Laytonville. Windows to the Future is a nationally recognized model of integrated academic-vocational curriculum linking social science and communication with the community. The Adopt-a-Watershed programs in each district are directly related to the ecology of the region. These scientific, natural history, and regional history projects fit nicely into the bioregional theme. New projects similarly embrace the science and history of the region.

Major goals of the NCRCN project are to:

  Improve student learning by engaging them in project based and service learning activities which will help them learn concepts, apply skills, and serve and appreciate their community.

Project based and service learning activities engage students in complex, real-world problem-solving that has been shown to increase student engagement and improve academic achievement. It is academically rigorous, relevant to students and community, and empowers students as active learners.