In Arthurian legend, Avalon is “The Fortunate Isle.” For the faculty and many of the
187 students, the Avalon School in St. Paul, Minnesota is also wonderfully detached
from the mainland of public education. From the old coffee factory in which it
operates to the individual student work-spaces, it doesn’t look much like school at
all.

To understand the island of Avalon it is necessary to hold three concepts in mind at
the same time: First, the idea of project-based learning: not just doing projects as
part of a class assignment but understanding schooling as a series of studentinitiated
projects. Second, the idea of a democratic organization in which students
set a lot of the rules, resolve conflicts, and enforce many of the norms. And third,
the idea of a teacher-run school in the utopian tradition of producers’ cooperatives.
At Avalon these three ideas are so bundled together that the school would lose its
identity if one of them were pulled away. Clearly, the teachers at Avalon have craft
knowledge about how to run project-based learning. But how much of that craft
knowledge depends on the fact that teachers work in an environment where
students are socialized to take responsibility for their own learning and that
consciously learning from failure is an important part of the process?

Clearly, students at Avalon run their own Congress that makes the rules for the
school. But how much of their capacity to do so is a function of a set of collegial
relationships built through the process of working on projects, study groups, and
daily experience in relational trust building? Clearly, faculty at Avalon have created
and sustained a producers’ cooperative with no permanent administration. But how
much of that is sustainable because the adults are driven by the democratic
organization imperative as an essential pedagogical tool?