Annual Reports
A Unique Public School in a Unique City
Like most local schools, we started during a time of educational reform. Unlike most local schools, we’re constructing a new kind of local education — one that’s equitable, diverse and innovative.
While most schools follow a model created more than a century ago, Bricolage is designed with the future in mind. We educate children from all backgrounds and teach essential life skills like reasoning, critical thinking, problem solving, planning, and managing ambiguity. Everything connects to our mission of advancing equity and creating innovators.
A Unique Name
The word bricolage typically means a ‘mash-up’ or a creation from a diverse range of available things. Often used in art to describe a sculpture or other work that brings together random objects that typically don’t go together, it can also be used to describe creative problem solving in the vein of MacGyver. Finding a solution to a challenge from unlikely places is the mark of a bricoleur or one who practices bricolage. In education research, the term bricolage was used by Seymour Papert, the father of constructionism, to mean “a way of learning by trying testing and playing around.”
We are a mash-up of backgrounds, instructional approaches and people, but our overriding educational philosophy strives to develop students into creative problem solvers who will change the world.