Parent Participation

In the community of learners everyone is teaching and everyone is learning. It’s a two-way street, or better, it’s a rich and complicated interaction of a network of people and ideas.  –Dr. Kerry Koller

Parents’ Participation in the Community of Learners

Trinity Academy Meadow View’s philosophy of education is anchored in the idea of a community of learners. On campus, this community is centered on the faculty who in themselves form a community of life-long learners, and the faculty invite the students into this community. In the beginning, the students are primarily learning from the faculty, but as they mature, the students increasingly learn from each other as well as provide questions and insights for the faculty’s own learning. 

Essential Contributors

Parents are integral to multiple aspects of the Meadow View community that help create  thriving relationships and a well-run school. They are members of the board and advisory committee. They host and organize socials for parents and faculty, as well as for their children. They chaperone dances and help serve pizza during lunch. They cheer the students on in sports events and applaud them in Fine Arts Nights. They provide heroic amounts of carpooling, including help driving the school’s minibuses.

Participants

Parents also participate in the community of learners. Trinity families’ homes are naturally a place of collaborative learning, too, not just because students discuss over the family meal what they are learning in classes, but because every family member is learning throughout their lives. Such learning can include studying the Scriptures, reading in a wide range of fields, appreciating great music, visiting museums, or viewing exceptional films. It also includes learning any kind of skill or hobby. This type of rich and varied learning awakens us to our full humanity. Moreover, as these types of things are done together or shared through conversations, there is a community of learners.

Purveyors of the Culture

Furthermore, there are characteristics of life in a community of learners that can be practiced anywhere and which are likely already familiar to everyone in the Trinity community.  Communities of learners recognize that multiple minds working together on a problem in a free and disciplined exchange of ideas will come up with a better, more polished solution, and that it is more enjoyable to figure things out together. They recognize that anyone, even someone younger or newer to the community, can have an important insight, even the key insight.  And they know that “learning” is not just an intellectual activity.  It includes actions. It is more than growing in an understanding of what is true and good, but includes practicing goodness and creating what is beautiful.