Justin Schwamm+Brief Bio

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If I could reduce my life to a single tagline, it would be, "He helped to build joyful learning communities."  I was born and raised in a small Southern city (Knoxville, TN) at a time when there were still sharp divisions of class and ethnicity; attended a small Midwestern college that worked hard to build learning communities; and returned to another small, but very diverse Southern city (Fayetteville, NC) to teach and to help young people build joyful learning communities around Latin, the ancient Roman world, and the many intersections with our own languages and cultures.   I was one of the inaugural group of National Board Certified Teachers of Latin, and I've done work on Latin curriculum, engaging diverse learners, differentiating instruction, and standards for training new teachers at the local, state, and national levels.  But after almost two decades attempting to work within the system in high-school classrooms, I have realized that it's probably better to build a new, better system instead of attempting to rebuild an old, decaying one.  I have been working on two projects that you might find interesting:

  • The Tres Columnae Project is an effort to Build a Joyful Learning Community around collaborative content creation.  Our Latin learners, both in the US and in the UK, create and share their own stories, images, audio, video, and multimedia projects, and their creations become learning materials for others to use.  Our goal is to explode the 20th-century concept of the textbook and replace it with something fresh, exciting, organic, and constantly changing.
  • The Three Column Schools (vision statement) will give learners and their families both literal and metaphorical ownership of the learning process and their learning environment.  Again, we aim to take a very 20th-century notion (the factory-model school), deconstruct it, and replace it with something fresh, exciting, and much more appropriate for the post-industrial world.  Through self-paced work, passion-based projects, and working together to solve real-life problems, our learners – and their families – will Build a Joyful Learning Community as they Build Something Meaningful Together.  The hands-on, collaborative, project-focused community work has some strong similarities with your vision for the Labs, and I would love to talk more with you about possibilities for synergy.

Oh, and in my "extensive" spare time, I spend time with my family and enjoy reading, cooking, and music.