City as Our Campus

City as Our Campus℠ amplifies our lower school student experience by providing unique educational opportunities with academic, cultural, scientific, non-profit, and business communities in Pittsburgh. City as Our Campus is an extension of Winchester Thurston’s core curriculum and augments it by providing meaningful, real-world experiences. By working with diverse members of the community (and with a range of resources, tools, and materials) lower school students not only gain understanding of the community’s most pressing issues, but they work to solve them.

In our Lower School, students and teachers are working together to investigate the history, function, and issues of our community. Students learn from and engage with the community, including exploring the community through systems thinking, tackling environmental issues in our region, learning from local experts, and gaining access to world-renowned museums and theater companies. As part of our Lower School curriculum, students engage with the community through relevant, impactful learning experiences.

Explore some examples of City as Our Campus initiatives.

Playground Accessibility Project

Design accessible playgrounds = action. 

Study of Pittsburgh

Learning about Pittsburgh's history through the lens of ingenuity helps third graders gain a deeper understanding of our city today. The students visit cultural and historical sites and examine issues and problems in our city. Throughout this work, students are considering their role within the larger system and how they might take action to innovate in ways that will improve our city for its residents. They culminate the unit by working with local non-profit leaders to develop their own non-profit that meets a local need. 

From There to Here

Pittsburgh is a city with increasing diversity from immigration. To better understand the impacts of immigration, fifth-grade students capture oral histories of people who immigrated to Pittsburgh. A partnership with SLB Radio Productions teaches students interviewing skills and then tasks them with conducting and editing interviews to create an interactive archive of immigration stories. This project honors these people and their stories while encouraging our students to consider the various experiences and motivations of all people. They walk away from the project with a deeper understanding of who lives in Pittsburgh and how they got there.