I plan to build a community in my classroom through a variety of projects which encourage students to present their identities to one another as well as work together to create a variety of collaborative projects. My unit for our Advanced Methods class actually was designed around building a community. The first lesson is centered around creating identity boxes and then working as a class to build a super structure of the boxes to represent our class as a community of different identities coming together to form one large representation. The second lesson focuses on working in groups, now that they should have learned more about one another, for a common goal. Students will be designing logos for their Homecoming Week and will be competing to create the best logo to be chosen to represent the school. The third lesson involves a similar campaign element, but students will use the strength of their own community to inform the world about certain issues that they feel inclined to advocate for.
The personal exploration as well as group work that is involved in this unit was planned in order for students to better understand one another and learn to work together, putting aside their differences, for a common goal. My desire was to have them learn about one another so that gang activity, social isolation, cliques, language, discrimination, disability, and socio economic status would no longer separate students from one another as they focus on a project they can all relate to.
Now I know this goal may be a far fetched utopia, but I believe that if students are given a chance to work with one another and are encouraged to explore their identities and share their discoveries, then students will be supported in the steps to understanding one another. We need to foster lessons that support students in a journey to meet people different from their own backgrounds and learn to connect with them on a multitude of levels. It is my goal to achieve this understanding through conducting lessons that are valid to students’ lives with purposeful meanings that are clear to both teacher and class.
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I like your post this week, very nice. Your second lesson is full of possibilties for students to become involved and get creative. What do you do if students dont want to share or put for any effort to collaborate? How would you overcome that? What if a student is very open and shares some deep stuff that may make the class speechless or you speechless? I do think this is an amazing idea for a lesson, it just might be hard to get students to open up as you imagine, or hope they would. Sadly :(
ReplyDeleteI think what I appreciate most about your entry is how community building was more proactive, rather than brought about by troubleshooting strategies. I think both are need, but it was good to see this side of things.
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