Reportback from the General Assembly

We held an open General Assembly on June 4th, 2009, to get the ball rolling on the Free School project.  As you can see, a lot of people turned out to hear what we had in mind and help us figure out how to move the project forward:

You can listen to the recording we made of the whole assembly if you missed it: 

(You can download the file if the flash widget doesn't work here.)

One of the most exciting parts of the assembly was asking everyone to write down courses they might want to teach - the result was a giant wall of potential courses:

In no particular order, here's the list of potential courses we wrote down at the end of the night off that wall Beginning Arabic Languauge/Culture, Aerial/Silk, Deconstructing Internalized Sexism, Surrealism (The History and Politics of...), Semiotics, Organizational Learning, Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction (and Audio Documentary), Intro to Anthropology, Buddhism and Meditation, Graphic and Web Design, Calculus/Statistics/Sustainable Technologies, Politics and History of the Middle East,Conflict Analysis: From a Peace and Conflict Resolution Foundation, Apartment Gardening, Marginalized Queer Communities: Exploring Facts and Myths, Quantum Mechanics (Philosophy and Science of...), Basics of Final Cut Pro,   Women and Performance, Sewing Basics (or not so basic), Bicycle Repair, Das Kapital by Marx, Residential Energy Savings, Information Literacy, The Prison Industrial Complex, Women's Heath, Guitar and Violin (old timey folk), Stencil Graffitti and Silk Screening, Facilitating a Discussion Regarding Solutions to the DRUG WAR in Baltimore (specifically) and at the national level, Tactics (Against Modern Capitalism: Protests/ Boycotts/ Organizing, etc., etc.), Population Politics, Intro to Franz Fanon, Overview of the Male-bodied Genital Exam and Prostrate Exam, Fear and Politics in Modern German History, Practical Algebra, Feminist or pacifist or otherwise critical approaches to International Security, Bookkeeping for Small Businesses, Left/activist History/Theory, French, Various Topics in Anthropology, What is Anarchism?, Lessons from the Gulf Coast: Life Cycle of Disaster and Recovery, Environmental Ethics Group, Intro to American Muslim Writers, Small scale Solar Cell Design, ABC's of Using Computers to Make Art/Code and Hardware ? w/ Baltimore Node, Jazz Music Theory and Composition, The Dark Room- D.I.Y Film Photography Processing and Printing, Confronting Male Privilege, African Security Issues, Mindful Drawing, Personal Finance, Auto-Mechanics, Linear Algebra/Signal Processing, Zine-making, Conversational Spanish, ESL, Violence Against Women/Relationship Violence, World Geography, Moral Issues or War and Conflict, Getting Non-mainstream Messages into Mainstream Media, Alternative Family and Relationship Models, Classical Mechanics, Potential Urban Spaces: Public Sculpture and Urban Theory, and History of the Idea of Race - and these were just the courses people who were able to come to the assembly were willing to teach!

You can download our full notes from the meeting below: