The Urban Assembly School for Green Careers, located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, is both a Learning Cultures School, and New York City’s premier sustainability-themed technical science high school.
As a Learning Cultures School, we are rooted in the philosophic principles of John Dewey. We believe students are most successful when they are held responsible for their own learning, that authentic learning is a social process requiring students to engage in cooperative inquiry and reasoning, free exchange of ideas and questions, and the pursuit of their own intentions within each content area.
To support this belief across every classroom, students’ learning experiences are framed by common instructional formats. Our students are given direct access to the standards, the curriculum, and a wide variety of resources. They are taught how to navigate the resources of their classroom, and to communicate and collaborate effectively, so that they can master content, responsibly achieve their own learning intentions, and promote the learning of their peers.
We are a different kind of school in four main ways:
- We provide a mandatory four-year writing program, in which students develop personal agency, their written voice, style and power by being taught how to make responsible decisions in selecting their own topics, genres and audiences. Students also engage daily in providing peer-to-peer feedback and presenting their original work using structured protocols.
- In every classroom, across every content area, students engage in perspective-shifting discourse and student-facilitated intellectual debate to sharpen their conceptual understanding and refine their inquiry questions, to challenge peers’ positions and to test the their own, and to develop shared meaning of common texts.
- Our academic science program is physics-based. Students focus on energy and the laws of thermodynamics through student-designed, interest-based investigations.
- Our students are required to complete a four-year technical science major in either building science, the study of applied physics, architecture and engineering, or horticulture. Our students’ learning in either pathway is supported by internships through our partnerships with such organizations as The Nature Conservancy, The New-York Horticultural Society, The Central Park Conservancy, Wave Hill Gardens, Steven Winter Associates, Turner Construction, and Jacob’s Pickles.
If you want to learn how to think freely, collaborate effectively to solve complex novel challenges, read, write and speak with passion, and develop the skills and knowledge to become a leader in confronting our planet’s sustainability dilemmas, then apply to The Urban Assembly School for Green Careers! We are hosting weekly open houses every Thursday morning from 8:30 – 10:00 a.m. The list of open houses is here. Please RSVP to Assistant Principal, Luke Janka at openhouse@uagreencareers.org or 212-787-1189, ext. 4074. Learn more at www.uagreencareers.org and www.learningcultures.net.
Urban Assembly for Green Careers
145 West 84th street
212-787-1189
