Market Interview: Our Resilient Community

At the Rabbit Hole Studios’ Sunday Market on Feb. 5, agile learning center director Thea Canby invited us into the brightly colored and welcoming room where Our Resilient Community holds class. We had an opportunity to discuss what Our Resilient Community is and how it developed.

Meet Our Resilient Community

What is Our Resilient Community?

We are the only queer-centered school in Georgia that we know of. We’ve been around for a year now, and we’re an agile learning center, which means we’re self-directed and multi-age. We’re open to kids as young as 6 and up to age 17. Right now we have 11–17 year olds enrolled. As a queer-centered school, we lift up queer culture, but we also do a lot of different things. They get a lot of the traditional education, but we also focus on social and emotional health. A lot of our kids have been bullied in nearby schools and public schools; they’ve been called slurs in the hallway, threatened, harassed and when they’ve gone to administration there’s been no recourse. They can’t learn in an environment that feels unsafe, so we’re a space that’s safer for queer students to come to.

When we read things, we’re reading about people that they can relate to. We learn about queer culture and queer history, and they all know it really well. We fight for queer rights, but then also, when they’re in our school they’re no longer THE queer kid or THE trans kid—they’re just a kid. So they also get to relax and learn geometry without worrying what’s going to happen in the hallway in five minutes.

What is the capacity for how many children the school can serve?

We have two facilitators, and we’re also the co-directors. We do individualized curriculum with each student and individualized instruction and tutoring. We’re interested in expanding over time, but right now we can serve 15 students. That’s depending on the students, because some need more assistance than others. Being multi-age, the older kids can work with the younger kids, too.

Can you explain the space Our Resilient Community operates out of?

We have a room in Rabbit Hole. It’s cool being in an artistic community space because there’s roller skates in there, there’s musical instruments, so they get to explore those resources.

The event space for adults is usually not occupied until the afternoon, so we’re usually by ourselves. There are a few people around who we know, and it’s nice having other adults around. Safety is another concern that we have. There’s a lock on the front door that needs your thumb to open it. During the school day, we make sure that the doors are closed. 

How does Our Resilient Community compare and contrast to traditional schools?

We have full-time and part-time students, some are technically homeschool students who come to us part-time for different parts of their education. Then we have students who are full-time, and it’s individualized, so we collaborate with students on their curriculum and their goals. We have students that want to go to college, so for them we look at what they need for that and we work towards that. It might be testing, or it might be they want to do a year with us and then a year at public school. They build what they need.

Our kids do really well in college so far. We’ve only been queer-centered for one year, but we’ve been doing agile learning centers for years. Our prior students do well in college because they’re used to being a part of the learning process and having a say in how they’re learning. 

We create a transcript for them, but they don’t receive a graduate certification from us. They could get a GED, or they can enroll in online schools in Georgia to get their high school diploma. There are charter schools online, and during the day with us they do their work for that course, we tutor them or we teach them if they’re learning something new. So in a way, we’re supplementing that. Some are considered homeschoolers, but some aren’t. It’s just different for each kid.

We’re a queer-centered school in the sense that we provide a safe space for that community and lift up queer culture, but we’re also queer in that we queer the idea of education that knowledge isn’t just when an adult is in front of you talking and you better write down what they said—it’s knowledge is out there, or in there, and we’re going to discover it together.

You mentioned fighting for queer rights, what part does that play in the curriculum?

Being queer in the South right now comes with challenges, and those challenges come with…I guess I could call them opportunities. But it’s opportunities to fight for your rights. Some of our students last semester met with the District Attorney Deborah Gonzalez. The [district attorney’s office] did this project called seats of justice, and the [students] made this installation that was shocking in some ways so Deborah Gonzalez wanted to meet with the students at our school. The kids educated her on some things that she might not have been aware of with trans rights and things going on, and they learned before she came and visited—they looked up things she said she’s willing to prosecute and not prosecute, and what district attorneys in that position can do to help them, what are district attorneys, how to talk to district attorneys. So they’re learning math in traditional ways, and then for civics and social engagement they’ve been to the state capitol, they’ve talked to state representatives, they know the laws in neighboring states, and they know [the process] when a bill is proposed. Our main student who talked to the DA and who emailed her afterwards with, “These are the things we’d like to see from you,” he’s 14. He’s learning rhetoric, like how do I seem credible, what logic can I use, and all these lessons that you’re supposed to learn in high school in the classroom but they’re learning by doing.

I do think they’re going to be queer leaders of tomorrow who are learning right now, in states all across America, that this game is rigged, how can we fix it? They’re already speaking to state representatives and going and making speeches, and they’re going to be amazing.

What credentials do you have, and how did Our Resilient Community start?

I moved to Athens from Miami right before the pandemic. I was teaching at a private high school in Miami, and it was pretty traditional. They asked me to leave because they said I’d be happier in a less conservative environment; having a trans teacher is hard. I wanted to try progressive education, like education that’s more in line with what research says is effective. So I was looking at agile learning centers, and I emailed Nicole Gustafson, who was running Atlas ALC at the time in Winterville. She hired me, and we were doing that for years. The pandemic was hard for everybody, and we went digital for a while. But it’s really hard to do self-directed education digitally. So we decided that it was time to do something else. 

We started Our Resilient Community together as an LLC. We had a community already from the other school, so some people came and joined us from that school, and we also had students who were having a difficult time in other schools join us.

We’re trying to do the thing as adults that we needed when we were kids. For me, in a lot of ways this school is a space where the young versions of ourselves could have something that we couldn’t have imagined having. Also with the anti-trans legislation going on in different states, it’s getting harder and harder for trans youth to feel safe in public and private schools. Having a space outside of those spaces that is safe is something that we’re passionate about. It is a niche thing, doing self-directed education that’s queer and open to all kids.

Learn more at ourresilientcommunity.org.