Building community at MBCI

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/12/2020 (1947 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When a school’s motto is “Life well learned,” people know that the teaching is about more than algebra, the periodic table, or poetry. At Mennonite Brethren Collegiate Institute in Elmwood, the ideals behind this motto have helped to shape the school’s community-building initiatives throughout this difficult year.

Alumni, students, and staff had been looking forward to 2020 as the celebration of MBCI’s 75th anniversary, with the prospect of all kinds of activities to mark the years since the school’s founding in 1945. Yet, like so many other events, the celebrations had to be delayed as the novel coronavirus pandemic swept through Canada. Instead, students and staff had to find ways to salvage an interrupted and often traumatic year. 

One of those ways was through community-building. The idea of community has always been important at MBCI, as it was in my time as a student there. As the MBCI website states, the pandemic has not changed the school’s vision for education: “Equipping students to learn, love, and engage with the world.” From encouraging alumni and donors to help build a commemorative walkway to initiating a project to choose class representatives, the school has been reaching out to the larger community of supporters.

Within the school, initiatives have also been directed at using the concept of community to help the learning process. Broadcasting a virtual band concert to highlight the students’ musical skills, posting Facebook videos to encourage and thank teachers, and displaying the school’s theme Bible verse for the year are some of the ways that people have been building community.  Meanwhile, a Grade 10 presentation of some of the ideas from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was one of the highlights of collaboration between students this year.

Students are not the only ones negotiating new ways of managing this year’s challenges. For school principal Andrea Neufeld, the goal for everyone working at MBCI is “to be a staff who creates a community of care for our students” so that “we then make it possible for learning and flourishing to happen.”

Project-based learning is part of the process, and teachers have designed initiatives that build community, such as constructing sheds for Habitat for Humanity and designing and making a nativity set for Donwood Manor personal-care home last year.

Even now, the staff and students at MBCI are still working to build a community that helps to make the most of what they have.

Susan Huebert is a community correspondent for Elmwood. 

Susan Huebert
Elmwood community correspondent

Susan Huebert is a community correspondent for Elmwood

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