Research & Service

The Mission of the Research and Service Program

The Research and Service Program at Vermont Commons School is an integral part of the school's mission and a full-credit course. The Research and Service Program allows the faculty and students to use skills learned in the classroom setting to better understand and serve their community and environment. The program provides students the opportunity to draw upon interdisciplinary connections to effect real change in their community.

Faculty will identify a need in the community and then work with students to define a solution and implement the service. Finally, the class will evaluate the effectiveness of their service and communicate their results to the VCS community. Research and Service meets three days each week, for four hours, in which students conduct various forms of research, such as experimental design and data collection and analysis, interviews, surveys, and attending lectures on their topics. As students learn about their work and its impact on the community, they come to appreciate connections to other aspects of the Commons curriculum.

Research and Service Common Methodology

All classes in the R&S Curriculum follow a common methodology of six steps:

Observe: looking closely at the world around us and focusing on some particular place or issue. Research is often a component of this process, whether document-based, scientifically oriented, or centered around interviews, media sources, etc.
Define the Problem: asking a question based on observation. This step often involves research necessary to establish context, designate parameters for the specific project, etc.
Propose a Solution: coming up with a proposed solution or hypothesis regarding the defined problem. This might include proposing and weighing alternative solutions, etc.
Praxis: putting our proposed solution into action. This step involves service, but it may also include research if the project is designed to provide data to a local organization, etc.
Reflection & Revision: reflecting on our praxis and, based on these experiences and/or experiments, possibly revising the solution or means of enacting it. How effective has our praxis been? What unexpected difficulties have we encountered? What additional information have we discovered, and does it contradict our hypothesis? What can we change in our approach? Additional research may be needed to supplement what we have discovered through praxis.
Communication: presenting our findings. This is an essential service, not simply to the organization we may be partnered with, but also to our own school community.

Any individual R&S course may focus more on one or more particular stages of this process, but the overall framework should be implicit in each project.

The following are examples of past and present Research and Service course offerings at Vermont Commons School. Click on the links to learn more.