Origins Mission and History

The mission of Origins, established in 1979 as a non-profit organization, is to promote an equitable and humane multicultural democracy through quality education for all.

The Early Years

Multicultural Understanding through the Arts

In the early years of our work, we focused on multicultural understanding, especially through the experience with the arts of different cultures. We assembled and toured throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe, exhibitions of native art, mostly from North America, to museums, along with supporting educational publications, videos, lectures, and children’s activities. We brought collections of art and artifacts from these cultures into schools where we provided extended residencies intended to raise awareness of self and other, and forge a spirit of curiosity, humility, and respect about difference.

1990

Building Academic Communities Through the Arts

One of the things we noticed as we worked to raise consciousness about multicultural understanding was that whenever people engaged in arts activities together, differences became more an element of variety and interest and less a source of division. Creating together and operating in an imaginative mode seemed itself to bring out the best possibilities of community. We began to regularly offer programs for children and adults through arts residencies during the school year and summer programs for teachers to develop their own arts capabilities and encourage their students to do the same.

1994

The Responsive Classroom

In 1990, we learned of an approach to building mutually supportive communities called the Responsive Classroom. We saw immediately that to achieve respectful, caring communities in schools, we needed to go underneath conversations about cultural dynamics to the actual lived behaviors of the people, children and adults, in their day to day life together. We recognized the need for carefully designed structures that would guide everyone who lived and worked in a school to healthy, caring relationships. We saw that it was from all of these good relationships that the climate would become safe enough to support real excellence in learning. And schools that lacked such a climate seemed to be foundering. Within a few years, Origins became a regional center for the work of the Responsive Classroom, and now serves Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Oklahoma in that capacity.

1995

Arts Integration into Responsive Classrooms

At about the same time, we began to see that unless children were deeply engaged in their learning, no structure of support for their social behaviors would be sufficient. The arts provided a doorway into engagement. They fostered differentiation, multiple intelligences, brain-based learning, and cognitive growth to such a degree that research evidence was rapidly accumulating to promote arts integration in school curriculums. At the same time it became all too obvious that arts exploration was not successful with children who lacked social skills and within school communities that were disruptive. Origins began to require Responsive Classroom 1, the weeklong introduction to the implementation of the Responsive Classroom approach, as a prerequisite for taking Building Academic Communities Through the Arts.

2003

New City School

As part of our on-going effort to support school success, Origins supported the founding of New City School, a charter school demonstration site for the consistent application of all of our work. New City School, located in Northeast Minneapolis, now provides an example of the integration of a strong, supportive social program with a challenging and imaginative academic approach. The structures it uses are the Responsive Classroom, arts-integration, and integrated thematic learning. For more information, visit the New City School website.

2004

25th Anniversary of Origins and Developmental Designs for Middle School

As we worked with the Responsive Classroom approach in middle schools, we began to make adaptations in it to meet the needs of middle level students (grades 5-9) and their teachers. In 2004 we introduced an approach to the integration of social and academic learning that was distinctly tailored to those needs: Developmental Designs for Middle School. We offered workshops and on-site support in creating middle schools with students engaged in learning in the context of caring, supportive community. Our goal for them was responsible independence in the pursuit of excellence.

2005 and Beyond

Back to our Roots . . . and New Publications

As we looked at the work of our first 25 years, the Origins board and staff noted that it was time for us to return our attention to cultural understanding, and to integrate that focus with our social, academic, and arts-integration work at both the elementary and middle levels. Future plans include publication of a revised edition of To Hold Us Together: Seven Conversations for Multicultural Understanding and a series of children's books that can be used to initiate these conversations in the classroom.

Origins is also poised to begin publishing books to support the Developmental Designs approach, our fast-developing work in middle schools. Books can leverage learning after training, as well as provide ways for educators to begin examining and sharing the approach with others in their schools. Our first books will focus on advisory, including the Circle of Power and Respect (advisory meeting format), and on proactive classroom management strategies.