| Upland Hills School | |
|---|---|
| Location | |
 | |
Oxford, Michigan, USA | |
| Information | |
| Founded | 1971 |
Upland Hills School, founded in 1971, is an independent school community in Oxford, Michigan, USA, whose purpose is to educate pre-high school children. The school's aim is to discover and respect the uniqueness of every child.
The school is located in northern Oakland County on 12 acres (49,000 m2) of woods and rolling meadows in Oxford. The school is surrounded by the Upland Hills Ecological Awareness Center, Upland Hills Farm and Bald Mountain Recreation Area.
It is an independent school founded in 1971 by parents who were determined to create a school that protected, fostered, defended and nurtured the creativity and wonder of childhood. Inspired by the collective works of R. Buckminster Fuller and J. Krishnamurti, the school is devoted to thinking in whole systems and developing tools for self-awareness. [1] The curriculum of the school embraces the theory of multiple intelligences and uses a developmental approach pioneered by Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg and Susanne Cook-Greuter. The school started experimenting with alternative energy in 1973 and has continued to develop an ecologically sustainable curriculum using tools and artifacts to demonstrate the effectiveness of working with nature's design. In 2010, the school installed 40 PV solar panels that generate over 10 KW of electrical energy moving it a step closer to becoming a net energy school.
The Community-Supported Agriculture, or CSA, [2] serves as an outdoor classroom, allowing students to plant seeds, harvest, and learn about the food cycle. Additionally, the Karen Joy Theatre [3] has been an integral part of curriculum since the school's founding, integrating performance, teamwork, and the magic of wonder.
UHS is a member of the Association of Independent Michigan Schools and the National Coalition of Alternative Community Schools and has affiliations with the Buckminster Fuller Institute, The Starkey Hearing Foundation and the Independent Schools Association of the Central States.
Richard Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more than 30 books and coining or popularizing such terms as "Spaceship Earth", "Dymaxion", "ephemeralization", "synergetics", and "tensegrity".
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James Tennant Baldwin, often known as Jay Baldwin or J. Baldwin, was an American industrial designer and writer. Baldwin was a student of Buckminster Fuller; Baldwin's work was inspired by Fuller's principles and, in the case of some of Baldwin's published writings, he popularized and interpreted Fuller's ideas and achievements. In his own right, Baldwin was a figure in American designers' efforts to incorporate solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources. In his career, being a fabricator was as important as being a designer. Baldwin was noted as the inventor of the "Pillow Dome", a design that combines Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome with panels of inflated ETFE plastic panels.
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Synergetics is the empirical study of systems in transformation, with an emphasis on whole system behaviors unpredicted by the behavior of any components in isolation. R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) named and pioneered the field. His two-volume work Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking, in collaboration with E. J. Applewhite, distills a lifetime of research into book form.
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