Rochester Freedom School Students Learning Earthen Architecture

The Freedom School, located at 630 N. Goodman St., is working to provide education that's centered in it's community and meaningful to urban youth. As part of the summar camp program, students are learning to build houses using earthen achitecture, called Eco-domes.

Right now, students are building a 2-person emergency shelter, which are set up in disaster areas. Later the students will work to build a full-sized house using the same process. I talked with George Moses, the director of the Freedom School, about the project, it's goals and the larger vision of the Freedom School. The Freedom School is part of the larger Freedom School project of the Children's Defense Fund.

Overview of the Project

It's a basic concept: filling the bag with earth. Mastering that concept is not as easy as it looks [laughs]. Because you have to make it fit a certain particular shape and that one shape has to fit in the overall and every placement has to fit in that overall. What's happening is: they're making mistakes, but it's okay. It's a terrific learning experience.

We're building an emergency shelter because it's the simplest of the designs, but it really helps you master those basic concepts of tamping, filling it with earth, making sure your diameters are correct and just being able to see it being built and taken down. We let them make mistakes so they can see how that one mistake, if it's not fixed, will actually corrupt the design. We're working right now with our 3rd grade though 12th graders and they're getting pretty good at it. We just take it up and take it down.

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Once you've mastered the basic fundamentals you can make it as big as you want; it can be any shape you want; you can then start to play with designs. We're approved for an eco-dome, which is different from this emergency shelter. The eco-dome is first of all bigger, it's going to be 400 square feet and it's going to have a lot of amenities. It's going to have electricity, it's going to have water, and we'll really be able to showcase a model on how beautiful earthen architecture is. It's eco-friendly, green-friendly. We're going to make sure that the folks who tend to not benefit from a lot of the new technologies — they benefit from them. So we've been very intentional with who we've been working with, how we've been working with them and the pace we've been working with them on it.

The Freedom School Vision

Freedom school is a literacy program. The core is literacy. We're the grand child of the freedom schools of the 60s, where you would have college students from up north going down south, primarily Mississippi delta, to train folks to help them pass their literacy exams so they could vote.

In 1993, Marian Wright Edelman revived the Freedom Schools in the current format. We have 5 pillars: Literacy, which is still at the core; intergenerational servant leadership development; civic engagement and social action; nutrition, health and mental health; and parent and family involvement. [Full Description of the Freedom School Program]

Everything we do comes out of those five pillars; that's how you build a community. We use intergenerational teams: adults, students - high school, college and middle school - working together as teams. [The eco-dome project is] civic and social action because we all know there's a problem with the environment, with sustainable housing, and then jobs. This is a vocational skill. We're going to train 6-year-olds on the basics so we're going to have the whole family able to work on this project. And it's inexpensive because we're using what's already available.

We had an international team that came in for two weeks and we trained our staffers using our model. Then we brought in the college students and had the adult and the college students working together. Then the adults backed out and the trainers worked with the college students and the high school students. Now the high school students are working with the middle school students. We just keep building that chain so by the time we finish the whole village will know this technology

Building Community and Building People

We hear the statement a lot, "it takes a village to raise a child", but I always tell people, "tell me the village, who's the village," because a village has a whole different concept of how we work all together. [For example] community, the common unity that we all share, and if you don't have a common unity, where's the village?

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Education is something that was a component of the village and a component of the community. One of the problems with institutionalizing education is you then take it outside of the community and then you have another system defining what you want to educate for: for other villages, and other communities.

One of the basic things that we do at the Freedom School is we don't teach the mechanics of reading. What we do is instill in the child the motivation to want to keep reading, to want to keep going on in spite of everything else.

We tell our young folks, "we know it's difficult. We know it's not the same as it was when we were growing up." The challenges that they face are a lot harder. We know these things. We know you may not have the best situation in terms of your home, your mother, your father or a stable family. But you can't let that stop you.

And you have support, you have people that's going to help you. You may not have a mother and a father that's going to help you, but you have a mother-figure here; you have a father-figure here; and you have the brother figure, the sister-figure, the grandfather-figure, the grandma-figure, aunty, uncle, you have all those figures,

Connections to the Environmental Movement

One of the things that we've added, along with the whole concept of "green," is addressing N.D.D. — Nature Deficit Disorder — which is simple: kids aren't going outside and playing. They don't know what poison ivy is. They haven't really got down in dirt. [We tell them] it's okay to be dirty. This is your environment; this is your yard; this is free, unstructured play and you're free to let your mind go; this piece of dirt can be whatever you want it to be; this forest of trees and grass can be whatever you want it to be. We're getting our children, within the context of where they are, to appreciate what is actually there, expanding their horizons.

This mural came about [because an art teacher said], "I want to do birds, but I want to bring the kids out to a bird farm". People said, "those kids from the city aren't going to want to go out to a bird farm". If you see the pictures when they getting off the bus they [look resistant], because that's the face they gotta put on to get out of their house. In a new environment, they are going to put on the same face — that's just logical. But then once they are there, they start to adjust. And they're wondering why no birds are coming over to them. It's cause you're talking. You're too loud. You have to be quiet, stand still and they will actually eat out of your hand. What you started to see with our kids was: they stopped. The loudest child, she just stopped, had a seed in her hand and just stood there so the bird would come. The children adjusted to the environment.

In terms of environmentalism, because of how they've been portrayed in the media, when you say an environmentalist, most people think "oh man, treehuggers or those people trying to save whales, and I don't even have an ocean by me. Why is a whale of concern to me? The tree is not the issue for me." So it may not be that person's issue, but there's probably something else that that person does within the environment and what is it? Why is it important? Taking from and moving to other environments to develop a strong sense of appreciation [is important], but it's more than events. It's got to be constant experiences and it's beautiful to watch it grow.