Monday, July 30, 2012

Campus School on the Digital Commons!

For all of you who may have attended the Campus School, or did your student teaching there, or worked there, you'll be interested to know that our Digital Commons now has a collection devoted to the Campus School. It was only launched this past week, but there is some material in there already, and more will be added. If you aren't familiar with what the "campus school" was, the brief explanation is as follows.

Brockport's campus school ran from 1867-1981. It served several purposes, including offering hands on training for students learning to be teachers, and as an experimental school in which to try out new teaching techniques and technologies. It was an actual school; it varied over the years, but always included at least grades 1-8. Usually there were two sections of each grade, and the students were children from the local area for most of its history, although in the last years the school was a pioneer in urban suburban integration efforts. The children had full time teachers who both taught the classes, and oversaw the rotation of student teachers through the class. For many years the school was housed in a wing of the main building, then in 1965 Cooper Hall opened, which was built expressly to house the Campus School. (Pictured here are campus school children running around a Maypole on the lawn of Hartwell in the early 1950s.)