Ideas and Resources to Address the Muslim and Refugee Ban in the Classroom

Coming off a weekend of protesting, I find myself thinking hard about what to say to my students tomorrow when they ask me about the news. We saw some of our students at the rally at the White House today. They will want to share observations from their experience tomorrow. Students will also have questions about checks and balances since we recently concluded a unit on US Government. They will have overheard conversations between adults and understood only snippets of what was going on in the media. Where do we start?

Our planned read aloud for tomorrow!

Start with a read aloud. Ask students what connections they can make to the story. Can they make text to self connections? Model by thinking of a time you yourself were homesick or scared or missed someone. What about text to world connections? How does the story connect to events happening in the world today?

The Journey by Francesca Sanna is about a family who must leave their home and country to escape war and hopefully find safety. After you read it, talk about what the word “refugee” means. This is the book we will read aloud tomorrow. You can find more ideas for relevant picture books here. Naturally, there are many more out there- please comment below with your suggestions!

Discussion Ideas

Talk about the news. I like to start with an image (works well with my concrete 5th graders) for sign in and a table for responses with two columns: "I think" and "I wonder." You can do this on a large whiteboard or piece of chart paper, or individually (or in small groups) with handouts. It helps less confident students feel ready to share their thoughts and provides you with a way to find out what misconceptions versus accurate information students have and understand. The "I wonder" column also gives you a better sense of where to go to answer all of their questions and prompts them to ASK questions, which is always an excellent place to begin.

You can find images of the protests at airports here. You could also talk about the executive order and find the affected countries (and cities protesting) on a map. Here is an article describing the current situation in the seven affected countries (with a map highlighting their locations).

Here is a New York Times article with stories of some of the humans banned from the U.S. The article also includes a short video of protests at JFK airport. My students usually like to hear stories of individual people or families as it aids their comprehension by making the situation less abstract.

Other Useful Resources

UNHCR Teaching Resources and Toolkit for Teaching About Refugees

Brainpop video about religion (requires a Brainpop login; Brainpop also has informational videos about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and Citizenship).

A People’s History of Muslims in the United States (from Zinn Ed Project)

The First Amendment and Freedom of Religion lesson from Teaching Tolerance

8 educational resources to better understand the refugee crisis from Amnesty International

Naturally, there are SO many directions you could go and topics to cover. These are only some suggestions for ways to get started. You know your students (and school, and families, and administration) best. If you do try out one of these ideas or have other suggestions, please comment below! We’d love to hear how tomorrow goes in your classroom.

 

 

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Sinking Ship Simulation: Who do we VALUE?

"Well in the real world not everyone can get everything and this kind of showed me that not all our decision making processes are fair."

Notes on our whiteboard from the students' brainstorming and decision making process.

How it Works:

Yesterday in Social Studies, we did our Sinking Ship simulation (idea credit: we first read about this here). We had the students in half groups (when half the class is with us and half the class is with a different teacher) so we only had 13 students at a time. For each group, we started by handing out “assignments” on folded slips of paper.

The different roles were:

migrant worker

senator

someone who is currently unemployed

child

firefighter

teacher

nurse

doctor

babysitter

college student

taxi driver

lawyer

scientist

We then asked our students to get in a circle and told them that they were on a sinking ship, and there were only FIVE spots in the lifeboat. They had to work together to decide as a group which five people should go in the lifeboat.

Students immediately started making arguments for why they should be on the lifeboat. The senator claimed that he should get on the boat because he is important. Another student countered, “Not on the lifeboat!” One of our favorite funny moments occurred when someone agreed with the “senator” that he should be on the boat and another student said quietly to himself, “It depends if he is a Democrat or a Republican.”

Why We Love this Simulation:

We love this simulation for so many reasons--

• It is fascinating to watch the students work it out amongst themselves!

• It’s also interesting to hear the arguments the students come up, and note which students give up immediately when they read their assignment and decide that their job isn’t “good” enough.

• It is also very telling (and part of our debrief) to note when students laugh. Some laugh out loud when they read their role to their classmates and others start play acting their preconceived idea of that role. For example, the student who received “you are currently unemployed” said, “I just graduated from college. I don’t have a job and I live in my mother’s basement!” in a goofy voice as if he was acting out a role, and put labels on himself.

The Two Group's Decisions:

In the first group, the students worked collaboratively and ensured that everyone’s voice was heard (with some raised voices, but general agreement), while in the second group, one student took charge and made decisions for the group that were later challenged as “unfair.” The two groups also came to different conclusions about who should get a spot on the lifeboat. Their final choices for which "characters" should be on the lifeboat were:

Group One:

1. Doctor

2. Child

3. Nurse

4. Scientist

5. College student

Group Two:

1. Child

2. Person who is currently unemployed

3. Doctor

4. Senator

5. College student

Student Reflections:

"I thought it was unfair because it was based on stereotypes and generalization."

"One thing that did not go well was there was a lot of stereotypes of "taxi driver" and the "currently unemployed". This is bad because just because someone does not have a job does not mean they are not smart. Also people were saying things like how can a taxi driver help. This made us choose people whose jobs make more money, not on their basic humanity!"

"I can connect this to the real world with people who say people who have bad paying jobs aren’t smart. In this I felt stereotyped and I can connect that with the real world because people were using the same stereotypes."

Who would you choose to go on the lifeboat? Do you have other ideas for collaborative problem solving simulations? How else can we push our students to think critically about who is valued in our society and how different people or roles are valued?  We’d love to hear your ideas!

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Owning the Process: A Tool for all Writers

Hi everyone, Gabby here. I'm excited to share this idea with you today. It is one of my favorite ideas and tool we have used so far this year. You may have also noticed (we are 110% sure you have) that writing is a process and writing can be hard!

We all have our moments where we slump into the doldrums and lows where we just do not know how to get out. I noticed this with myself when working on storytelling pieces.. Each time I started to take on a story, I found myself landing in the same slumps and moaning at very similar times in the process. My friends would laugh on the phone, "Gabby, this always happens to you.. Right about now!"  What helped me was recognizing that the lows came specifically during the brainstorming process (and deciding which idea to use!) and just that knowledge that this was a part of my process, gave me some perspective to work through it. And thus, the writing process map was born!

The task: have students create wacky wonderful depictions of their own personal writing processes. Sure, many schools use Writer's Workshop (we do) and have a set few steps for how the writing process works, ie: brainstorming, drafting, or publishing etc. However, even within this structure we all (surprise!) take it on and experience it in our own unique way.

We asked our students to show through drawings, arrows (there ended up being SO many arrows), and captions how the writing process goes for them. We set them up with examples from different teachers and with a few questions to consider :

• What are times am I usually flowing and/ or excited during the Writing process? How do I show that?

• What are times when I am stuck and/or frustrated… ? Make sure to show that in all its glory!

• What works for me when I get stuck in this spot or that spot or another spot… make sure to include that!

From these questions our students created features like:

• "failure walls!" that popped up during brainstorming (or for one more reluctant writer, throughout his whole map!)

• or "alert!" signs telling them to take it slow when they had to take on editing their punctuation.

• We also saw pep talks written all over the maps like, "At this part for drafting, don't worry about your spelling!" and "You usually get mad here-- get water and keep going!".

• Some students even created a full table complete with multiple steps for how to work through their grumpy moments.

• Needless to say, every single map is different, even though on a larger level we go through a similar process as a class for Writing. We were blown away by their creativity and the fun they had thinking about themselves and naming what was hard for them.

Using Writing Process Maps:

At this point in the year, the writing process map continues to be one of our favorite tools. Some students bring it out with them when we work on any writing, some take it out only at the beginning of a new piece of writing to remind themselves of where they are headed personally in a tangible way. Other students, when they hit their grumpy frustrated points, get reminded by a teacher to go look at their process and see where they are in it. They often point to a spot in the map where they typically feel low and follow their map to move out of it. They gain some perspective and they keep trekking through to wonderful and challenging process of writing.

Try it out!

We would love to hear if anybody tries this with their students and if so, how it goes. Feel free to take a look at some of our students’ maps down below!

Sending you our best from D.C.

Steps a student wrote for themselves for how to move through their "failure wall" 

 

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Econ 101: Wealth Distribution Simulation

"I learned that the small population of the upper class have more money than the huge population of the middle class. I do not think it is fair because a small amount people get a huge advantage over the massive amount of people in the middle/lower class."  

That's right, today in class we talked about the very agreeable subject of…. Money! We started our Economics unit yesterday with a simulation. In our activity we had the students do IR (independent reading) in spaces that simulated how wealth is distributed in the US.

For example:

• 1 student has 11 chairs (wealthiest 1% has 42% of US wealth)

• 3 students have 9 chairs (next 9% has 36% of US wealth)

• 22 students have 6 chairs (bottom 90% has 22% of US wealth)

This part of the simulation was all fun and games for us. We squealed and giggled and playfully whined about our legs being squished trying to cram onto those 6 chairs. But then…

We brought out two large doughnuts, and we split the doughnuts along the same proportions. As you can imagine, this made the division of "wealth" much more real. The complaints about 'fairness' and frustrations began to fly. After the students representing the bottom 90% had a few minutes to squabble over how to split up the remaining part of a doughnut between all 22 of them, we called all of the students back together for discussion.

We started by asking: How are you feeling right now? Students went around and shared one word summing up their current emotional state. Many students said “unfair,” while the student who represented the top 1% said “deliciously luxurious.”  

Other questions we asked were:

What did you notice? How might you have felt or acted if you were in a different group? What are you thinking about money/wealth? What connections can you make to your life or to the world around you?

A very rich discussion ensued, including students reflecting about how they learned how to talk about money (or not talk about money, as the case may be). They described how it felt to learn about the reality of wealth distribution in our country, but simultaneously try to figure out how to feel sort of comfortable doing so and avoid being rude or making people feel bad.

Another image - the 2 parts really help students conceptualize the numbers!

Below are a few of our additional thoughts (from discussion time but also students’ homework reflections):

Here are some things that make us think about money:

• When a bill comes (like the water bill)

• When my mom goes to the bank

• Electronics

• Gifts

• When other people talk about it

• When people talk about their gifts

• Houses.. And other people’s houses

Here are some questions we have now that we have entered our initial study of economics:

• Around how many people are in the upper class?

• Besides housing, food, and care, what advantages does the upper class have?

• What if you make little money (so you are considered experiencing poverty), but your parents give you a lot of money. What “class” are you in then?

• What would it be like if, for a different country, people did the same thing and calculated the distribution of wealth. What would it be like?

• Out of all the people in the middle class in DC, how many people are in the upper middle class?

• Will there be a test?

• What class is my family in?

Let us know if you talk about money, wealth, or class in your classroom. How do you broach the topic? Do you discuss class issues? Study Economics? We'd love to hear!

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"Telling Truth" published on Bright via Medium!

We submitted a piece about our storytelling unit to Bright, Medium's platform for news about innovation in education and it was published today!  Please read Telling Truth: Why we teach storytelling to fifth graders and let us know what you think!

Why we need to talk about race

"It's personal."

"No one has ever talked about race in front of me so I think you don't talk about it. Ever."

"My parents have only talked about it once in front of me and they were REALLY uncomfortable, so I learned you shouldn't talk about race."

Earlier this school year, we asked our students what they know about talking about race. A few representative responses are quoted above. All of our students also agreed that race is confusing and they don't know much about it. We discussed how when something is confusing or we don't know much about it, the way to learn more about it IS to talk about it, even if it is uncomfortable.

So, this week was "race week" in our classroom. We started with a drawing activity, challenging students to realize stereotypes and expectations they've internalized without realizing, and continue on to learning about institutionalized racism and learning vocabulary and explaining concepts around race.

The drawing activity consists of us reading descriptions of various celebrities (we tried to pick people the kids would know) devoid of any descriptors related to race or gender, and asking students to draw the person they visualized. We give them ONLY crayons to draw with so they are forced to choose a skin color.

One of our student's drawings.

During the reveal process when we read the descriptions and showed them a photo of the celebrity in question, we asked them to raise their hands if they drew someone female/male or black/white/etc. Some students were very nervous even to raise their hands, and insisted they "didn't draw a race." There was a lot of discomfort, nervous laughter, and awkwardly looking away. Some students said they felt "weird" about their drawings. Others only admitted they visualized or drew someone having a particular race only after another student spoke up and said she was surprised that she automatically thought in stereotypical ways.

One student reflected,

"I thought I did not believe in stereotypes, but my drawings showed me I did."

We pushed them to then reflect on WHERE they were getting these messages and images from and reminded them of our Halloween investigation and all of the outside influences on our minds! One student wrote later,

"I used to think I wasn't racist, but now I'm thinking that it is weird that my mind was already being prejudiced beause I didn't think I was."

Next, we learned about racism by watching this video. We bleeped out a curse word and gave the students an outline of the main points to fill in, as well as stopping and discussing and watching the video twice (as they noted, she talks so fast!).  Students had a lot of questions about institutions and the idea of a social construct. We assured them that these are difficult concepts for adults and we would keep thinking and talking about them.  For homework that night, they read a Newsela article titled "For minority students, suspensions begin in the earliest grades" for a practical application of both institutional racism and intrinsic bias.

The finished charts from our "silent conversation." 

Later in the week, we had a class "silent conversation." If you haven't experienced the silent conversation set up before, you should try it and will love it! It is an amazing way to quietly and automatically build in reflection and responding to thoughts and questions of others.  We wrote stereotype, prejudice, race, culture, discrimination, identity, and bias down on sheets of chart paper. Then, we modeled how to have a silent conversation on the board and asked students what they noticed. They came up with: 

Be silent!

Write down your thoughts/reactions to the word on the paper.

Respond to other people's thoughts.

Show you agree with an exclamation point or you don't understand with a question mark. 

As you can see from the photo above, students had thoughtful and complex responses during our silent conversation. One student reflected afterward that writing instead of having to speak up really freed her to think of what she wanted to say as no one knew it was her writing and we were all just thinking of ideas separate from who wrote or said them.

Questions and thoughts students had after our silent conversation:

"I wonder why so many people think stereotypically. Even I think stereotypically without realizing it."
"I wonder how I can detect bias in myself and fix it? Also, I wonder if people naturally have prejudice or if it is something that is taught?"

In past years, we have had to explicitly connect this learning to present day issues, as our students used to think that racism was more of a problem in the past, like slavery or legally enforced segregation. They had learned a narrative that Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement "fixed" problems relating to racism. However, in the aftermath of the recent Presidential election and with frequent news of hateful harassment since Election Day (some in nearby areas), this year they easily made the connections on their own.

 

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Reflecting on our Field trip to the NMAAHC

What an AMAZING museum.

Our minds are still reeling with personal thoughts and our own identity politics, along with the incessant thinking that teachers do about every single one of their students and their learning. Our brains are on museum-fire!

Here are few things we are thinking about post-trip.

As adults -- we were reminded yet again the beauty, pain, and necessity of education. We especially loved the quote above. We also felt immensely grateful to be teaching at a (progressive and independent) school where we have autonomy over our curriculum and  discussion topics. We feel even more well-equipped (even just taking photos at the museum has given us so many resources and jumping off points). In addition, we feel even more charged to continue educating, re-educating, and unlearning with our students this year!

The students responded to the museum incredibly well. Being ten and eleven years old, they needed concrete artifacts and connections to confront the reality of slavery (and historical oppression) instead of thinking of it as a distant, past event in history. Our students found learning about ships used to transport enslaved Africans really powerful.

One student shared how one ship only arrived with only one person still alive (out of 171). He added that the conditions on the ships were terrible and Africans weren’t “being treated like people.” Another student noticed that some ships that carried slaves had names like Happy or Innocent, which really seemed like the wrong name to her, but it makes you think about perspective and how maybe what they were doing didn't seem that bad to them at the time. Our students really benefited from visiting a museum with a different perspective. One child mentioned that he often hears one narrative about Jackie Robinson, but at the museum he heard a totally different perspective about how the Negro leagues were deprived of their best players and took away some heroes from African American communities. This is, of course, a pattern we see in many avenues in our society.

For example, as adults, we see it admissions and employment and we love that they are starting to think about the complexity of a dynamic like this, in which accepting a few "model minorities" is a method of quieting the rest of that demographic and reinforcing the American Dream. Those few exceptional people who have 'made it' (ie a role model like Jackie Robinson) can now turn around to their own people and say (along with the rest of the system) "work harder and you can achieve this, too!" narrative. We won't necessarily take it there with our students, but we love that they could hear this idea explicitly at a MUSEUM!

Our students also have brains that are on museum-fire:

“I used to think that African American history was small and was mostly about being slaves. But now I’m thinking that their history is a big part in our society because they aren’t just slaves, or free, they are people and they had their own society.”

“My favorite part was learning history, even though it made me sad/upset. We can't pretend bad times didn't exist because they did and this museum made me more aware.”

We were a little apprehensive about whether or not this museum would be too much for our students. However, just as the incredible Ida B. Wells says, "The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them." We feel so incredibly grateful to work as being educators (and in turn, lifelong learners), and we found ourselves especially appreciative to be educating students in this city at this time. This museum is not only a labor of our entrenched American history but it also serves as a beacon to our students to learn many truths and remind them that they can be our lights towards a more pluralistic society.

Lingering Wonderings/ Moving Forward...

Now is the time. Now is the time to call the timeout in a classroom conversation to discuss an interaction that seemed intertwined with nuances about race. Now is the time talk with our students about how complicated some pieces of this conversation are… and how clear some others are, to share with them explicitly what a movement like Black Lives Matter is all about and how it came to be.

As teachers, it is our job to move a schedule forward, meet curriculum deadlines, do that thing called grading.. It never feels like the 'right' time when we are in it. Nevertheless, our students (and kids) are not going to get any better about conversing about these integral issues.. Without practice. And quite frankly, neither are we.

So here's to all you brave conversationalists out there 'leaning in' (is that still trendy to say?) and taking on conversations that feel nerve-wracking, painful, and confusing. As we tell the students, conversations in which you have a lot of feelings are incredible things as that usually means you care and/or you are speaking your truth.

Let's get to it and keep on keepin' on! And if you get a chance, check out the NMAAHC!

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Preparation, Race, and Field Trips

We must be the luckiest humans in the world! (Well, that and Nina spent a good 7+ hours on the phone listening to Wade in the Water). Can you guess where we are going with our students?

We are going to the NMAAHC!

View fullsize

After this elated moment of realization, it hits us.. Wow. We are going to the NMAAHC. That is phenomenal AND… How in the world do we prepare fifth graders for such a monumental moment, challenging and remarkable history, and then of course, logistically how many hours can we stretch with 26 ten and eleven year olds in a museum?! The questions, concerns, and backwards planning gears all began cranking at terrifying speeds. 

So here we are. Sharing with you some of the first pieces of preparation before we head to the museum on Tuesday (!!).

1. We think together as a class about: why do we learn about history? Why does it matter? We did this before we studied Indigenous People's Day/ Columbus Day and we also did some class thinking around why we celebrate holidays. If you don't have these kinds of thought circles before content-- we highly encourage you to do so. They set the tone for what you are about to embark on and we refer back to these throughout the entire year-- case and point, right now to prepare for this museum!

2. We've already modeled in our classroom that we call time outs and pause for real conversations and learning around race. Just yesterday a student said something that another student found offensive and replied "That's racist!". We paused our lesson as teachers and as a class.. And we talked about it together. Our students already know that conversations about isms (like racism) and identities are not distractions from our learning. They are our learning

3. We work on a definition of racism ahead of time. It is going to come up. They (and many adults) don't actually know what it means. We use the equation:

Racism = prejudice (against a race) + institutional power

It doesn't quite make 'sense' to many of them and very well may not until the end of the year or in ten years. However, we believe in teaching into the complexities of these conversations and cheering students on as we converse and question about all the confusing nuances together. We also believe in being honest with our students and so already in October (yesterday) we got sincere questions like, "These black boys said what is this white girl doing here?' was that racist?" Questions like these are honest and we love to encourage our students to be available for the heavy thinking that comes along with answers that are sometimes (often) quite counter to what they have been taught. The answer to that question was, "Ouch, that doesn't sound like it felt good. No, it was not racist.." And then we talk about WHY!

4. We celebrate and learn from Black excellence all. Of. the. Time! From our This I Believe pieces in which we used Howard White's "The Power of Hello" recording to the many amazing authors we have been using already in our Poetry unit… our students have already seen (and are learning from) phenomenal black thinkers. We hope this has set them to be even more excited about the NMAAHC.

5. We have an overview of SOME* major moments of American history from some black perspectives. We have them go over these (they will by no means take most of them in) so that by the time we get to the museum they at least have a general sense of how history has gone. We also are explicit about the weight of some of the subject matter/imagery and we go back to our earlier conversation about why we value learning about history

*There is a LARGE emphasis on the some because I (Gabby) had a tremendously hard time figuring out exactly what pieces to add into our timeline. I ended up adding poets we have been studying and other authors we know well (Like Jacqueline Woodson) so that this timeline is personalized to our classroom learning. We also, of course, have moments like Emancipation all the way to Michael Brown… This final lesson hasn't happened yet so you might want to stay tuned to see if it goes terribly! It is an clear overload of information and they will not t retain all of it, but we are aiming for it to provide some grounding for students and moments they personally gravitate towards.

6. We do pre-museum homework. In our classroom, one key way we are doing this is by reflecting ahead of time using the 5 W's. Some of these include reflecting on why we are going, why it is important to go, what we are excited about learning etc.. This also includes who will be there and who we might be in this space, along with how we should act. How we should act can include the basic metro safety tips, but can also include identity politics (we love promoting self-awareness!).  This also gives us as their teachers a moment to see where different kids are coming from before we take them. We can assess nerves, discomfort, excitement, and so on.

7. We model excitement (because we are!) and we tag some awesome colleagues to join us on this journey. We are grateful they have agreed to weave their way through this museum and experience it with ten and eleven year olds.

8. There's always more but we are leaving you with these. How would you all prepare? What have we missed? How do you prepare for field trips with your students?

Columbus Day Debates

We love debating as a way of developing critical thinking, practicing analytical skills, and thinking through persuasive arguments before we start writing them down as essays. Today, on Columbus Day (still a federal holiday), we had our students debate whether or not Columbus Day should be a holiday.

To set up this lesson, we have the students in two groups and give each group a different text.  One is framed to be pro Columbus and one is framed to be anti Columbus. We have them read and learn more about Christopher Columbus and then we offer them the opportunity to choose a side for the debate.

This series of lesson serves to introduce debating and giving them an opportunity to be try it out themselves, help students recognize the problematic nature of history from one perspective, and demonstrate that author’s purpose really does make a difference.  We go on to teach more lessons about critical reading and looking at language used, voices heard or omitted, and facts emphasized to understand the author’s perspective and biases.

This year, we were pleasantly surprised that only a few students wanted to be on the pro Columbus Day side of the debate. Many were undecided or in the middle, which was resolved after they went through the debate experience. We did hear the usual, “If he hadn’t come here we would never be here” argument as the lack of authentic or humanized Native American peoples in history, society, their lives means they identity with Columbus.

We also had to teach our students to say “discovered” in quotes, but they don’t fully understand how problematic that is until we give them an example that relates to them. Also, it is so hard to stop the “he discovered America” narrative because they have heard it SO. MANY. TIMES! No matter how many times we show them a map with his route to the Caribbean, it is something they “know” and is in mainstream society’s collective “knowledge” and consciousness.

The students continue to say that they enjoy learning about history even when it is painful, and that they prefer to know more sides to a story and something closer to the truth. They asked about why we (as adults and schools) continue to not correct the narrative and share more of the truth.  They had many thoughtful questions about why weren’t they taught the correct events and wanted to know why we (as a society) still teach children that Columbus was a good person?

Related resource:

Reconsider Columbus Day

Zinn Education Project: Abolish Columbus Day

 

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Service Learning Possibilities for the Year!

Service learning has been really tricky for us in the past as it can feel contrived or otherizing or at the very least, feel less than meaningful for our students.

Below are two ideas we have to incorporate thoughtful, beneficial service learning into our new school year.

We are very excited about some programs that are in the Dominican Republic, specifically, Alta Gracia, which would go really well with our Economics unit. Alta Gracia pays their workers a living wage and says that, "In addition to this salary, we respect our employees’ rights as workers and as human beings, including the right to a safe and healthy workplace, the right to be treated with dignity and respect on the job, and the right to form a union." We met with Alta Gracia employees and multiple union leaders and workers this summer, and feel like this could be a great conversation and mutually beneficial experience for our students and the company.

The other piece we have been thinking about is the Dakota Access Pipeline. Any of you who follow our work know that we care deeply and work to educate ourselves and our students as much as possible about Indigenous peoples' histories, struggles, and excellence, and to do our best to be in solidarity. We are thinking about how we might get our students involved in this conversation in an effective way.  We have already told them when we planned on attending protests and offered them the option of helping us make/decorate our signs!

Please, please fill us in if you have thoughts and skills on incorporating service learning into your classroom. This is definitely an area we want to grow!

More soon.

Nina and Gabby

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Preparing for the school year: Post #2: Things we are changing!

And we're back to continue our reflection on preparing for the upcoming school year.

In this post we want to share with you some of the things we want to change for the upcoming school year.

Change is constant, and we are excited to take it on, even as it brings some discomfort (and often a little extra work) into our lives. As Emily Style says, "Half the curriculum walks in the room with the students on the first day.." Which to us means that this list will most definitely get a whole lot longer and intricate as the year progresses!

We are going to try…

Mini-home groups:

• We already made a push to have affinity groups at our school. We now run an affinity group for 3-5th graders that we feel has brought so much life and love to our students of color. We love it so much that we have been wondering how to bring even more of that into our classroom, so that it isn't just that once a week moment where our SOC attendees feel exceptionally seen and heard.

• As a result, we are going to test out having little 'advisories' within our classroom. We are going to have to be creative about this schedule-wise (never enough time!) but we are willing to take on the headache to test this out.

• We have some new students this year, as well. We love the idea of a group of six kids getting to really know each other, have each other's backs, decompress together (especially after tough talks about the news), and take turns sharing together in a conversational community.

• We also love the seeds this space sows for storytelling and honoring one another's stories. We can get them well on their way feeling comfortable sharing from their own point of view as storytellers, before we have even begun our storytelling unit!

• We are going to try to facilitate with them as teachers at least once every two weeks to ensure a safe space and check in on how it is going. Depending on how things go, we will release our facilitation process (ideally!) as the year goes on.

Differentiating homework more effectively:

• This is something we are going to keep thinking about. See our post from our Differentiated Instruction conference here. We are going to be thinking (as always, but even more so) about differentiation and student support all year. Stay tuned.

Service Learning Work:

• We love the work our students do with SOME (So Others Might Eat) in which they create portraits of seniors who visit the SOME program.

• In general, however, we have struggled with how to do service learning work in a way that doesn't set up an 'us' / 'them' dichotomy and that is realistic about what is actually 'helpful'. We recognize that 26 ten year olds running around a quiet space so they can feel like they 'gave back' is not helpful. We also want to constantly question this notion that students already have about who needs help and who does the helping. This is a lot for 5th graders, and thus, we haven't quite figured it out yet ;).

• However, this year, we do want to teach/inquire specifically into the dynamics of help, and discuss working with people and organizations and talk through how we might do that.

• Two possibilities that are on our minds are working with Alta Gracia around labor rights and activism about the Dakota Access Pipeline

There are other things we will change, of course, but these are the big ideas we are mulling over.

In the meantime, let us know what kind of changes you have made (or think we should make!) that have improved your communities and your classrooms. We are always looking to make 5th grade better!

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Social Justice Tour to the Dominican Republic!

We were very fortunate to join a group of educators for a Friends Beyond Borders Social Justice Tour through the Dominican Republic earlier this summer. We loved exploring and learning more about a stunningly beautiful country as well as getting to know and collaborating with other educators.

Our trip covered so much ground and inspired a lot of reflection, so we will most likely be coming back to it in many future blog posts.  For now, here are a few key takeaways:

• Diverse authors: My main context for background information about Dominican history and culture came from Junot Diaz books. This background helped me make connections and build upon previous knowledge.  This is why diverse authors and voices are so important! Also, (sidenote) why do I know so little about a country the US has occupied twice in the last century?

  • Once starting on May 5, 1916

  • Once starting on April 28, 1965

Learning about the oh-so-incredible Mirabal sisters.

• The “developing” world: How do we understand poverty in different contexts? How can we talk about vast discrepancies in standards of living in other communities with students without dehumanizing or “otherizing” people experiencing poverty? How can we balance between confronting the reality of socioeconomic inequalities and simultaneously avoiding one dimensional interpretations or conceptualizations of a nation or people?

• Columbus’s legacy: his actions and racist policies still affect ALL OF US today. Part of the motivation for the genocide of the Taino people was to make way for African slaves. Also, “extreme” poverty in the developing world is not an accident. It is related to historically racist policies!

Visiting the Alta Gracia factory!

• Economics: we study Economics with our fifth graders and learn all about the labor force. After visiting the Alta Gracia factory, these issues came to life for us in a new way and now we are thinking about workers’ rights and humane conditions. Also, we need to add a more deliberate action component to this unit as there are real opportunities for activism here! As consumers, we really can vote with our money.

Please let us know your thoughts and reflections.  We would love suggestions or just to hear about what or how you are teaching!  Stay tuned as we try out some new things this school year!

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Social Justice Scope and Sequence Project

Now that it is FINALLY summer (happy summer, teachers!  Congratulations on the end of the school year!) We had free time to work on a summer curriculum and instruction program within our entire school. We compiled a social justice education scope and sequence based on existing work and needs from an anti-bias perspective.  I (Nina) worked with one of the Art teachers and our author in residence to come up with common vocabulary, document existing work, and identify gaps or areas we'd like to see more work done.  For reference, our school is K-8 and independent with one class per grade.

First of all, it was fascinating and inspiring to hear about and detail the work our colleagues are doing!  We have some amazing investigative work around gender in Kindergarten, work around social class, wealth, poverty, and food insecurity in first grade, action and advocacy in second, and so much more!  As a fifth grade teacher, I am so grateful my colleagues who lay the groundwork for what we try to do and of course, also the colleagues who follow up after our students leave us!

We did our best to compile resources and vocabulary to address gaps in programming that we addressed.  Some online resources we loved for this quest where: Teaching Tolerance Classroom Resources, Perspectives for a Diverse America, and Teaching for Change Booklists!

One of the gaps we noticed was around ableism.  In our 5th grade classroom, we do a "What is DisAbility?" investigation, but agreed that we needed conscious teaching around ability and language use starting much earlier.

We also created a vocabulary list with simplified and more specific definitions to use as a professional resource, with students, and as a reference for common language across the school.  We are very excited to see our exhaustive vocabulary list in action next year!

Please comment and tell us any ideas, suggestions, or connections you have.  How does social justice education build in your school or practice?  What resources inspire you??