I tried an experiment in student-centered planning for a new integrated unit last week with some success. Floundering around at the end of last term with class discussions, provocative questions, free writing, watching and critiquing the film "The Pursuit of Happyness" had not led me to anything solid for this term's unit that we could integrate. So it was back to the books over the holidays to find some answers and James A Beane, or at least an article in a book he edited came to the rescue, as did a meeting with a Victoria University lecturer before school started.
Beane writes that there are some themes that are consistently successful in their ability to interest young people and one of those was "Living in the Future". This was exactly what I needed because it seemed to pull a few of the ideas students had raised together. But it was still not quite right.
This is where an author in Democratic Schools, edited by Beane and Apple came in handy. She suggested asking students to silently write their response to the question "What questions or concerns do you have for the future for you personally and the world generally?" Students then were put into groups and told to share and write down any similar concerns on a piece of paper. They then connected up any self and world concerns or questions that they thought were related some how. We then put these up on the board and they had to decide on a theme based upon them. They came up with two, shifting the focus and the consequences of now and after a vote couldn't decide so we put them together. The next step will be for students to brainstorm any activities they want to do that will relate to this theme and for the teachers to do this as well. I want to look at Utopias and dystopias as well as some best case scenarios and worst case scenarios. It will be fun to make a timecapsule for when students leave school but also one to be opened in 2045, when they celebrate their 50th birthday.
I'm not up to this step though, and I even wonder if it wouldn't be worth getting them to make a collage as a title page with some magazines with their interpretation of the theme before we do that. In the blog entry about the exhibition there is a picture of a person looking at the globe and I was worried that for this assignment there had been too much observing and not enough participating. I asked showed students this image and asked them if thy could think of one that would serve as one to demonstrate the participating aspect. This proved too hard. The next period I found three examples from the net on the Education for Enterprise and Education for Sustainability websites. We watched two videos of a student radio station, a student magazine that had involved the community and a project to get some water tanks installed into a secondary school. The students then had to create, for want of a better word, a "body static image" of participation in the world with someone to explain it to the class. Then they did three minutes silent writing on the question "what is social studies". I think a better question might be "what do we do in social studies" but we'll see. If students regularly answered this question it would be a great way to check your teaching. The more sophisticated the answers the better the teaching is going. Of course it depends on a deep or at least continuing knowledge of the aims of social studies education. In that regard I have been fortunate enough to benefit from an assessment schedule our department is using created by Andrea Milligan, a Victoria University lecturer which is in the image. It is based on the different aspects of the Social Studies Inquiry booklet and planning rubric put out by the Ministry of Education. It will be interesting so see whether or not student's suggestions for activities to do and learn about are affected by the lesson described previously and the different aspects of the , marking schedule, essentially and rubric explaining what the purpose of social studies is and which they now all have glued into their books.
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