Community: Building Bridges
Community: Building Bridges
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This lesson focuses on second/third graders exploring the concepts of community, culture and acceptance. Students are learning about culture development (social studies) and communicating effectively using research and inquiry techniques (language arts). Students will use technology as a tool to access, record, organize and communicate their results (information and literacy standards). This unit may last 2-4 weeks depending on the number of students involved, depth of investigations and extent teacher wants to produce a diversity fair.
Because students in this area of Wisconsin are under exposed to diversity within their schools, experiences such as these are vital to healthy community development. The teacher describes the work of the area civic association and tells the class that a member from that organization will be coming tomorrow to describe a current project and will be asking for help from the students. The teacher will ask if any of the students have had the opportunity to help their community. If so, the students will share their experiences and feelings with community work.
The teacher will help the students summarize the importance of working with community organizations and predict what would happen if no one gave time or energy to community efforts. After the community representative describes the relocation of the families from India and problems they are facing, the representative will lead the students in a brainstorming activity which lists ways they could become involved in helping their community understand various cultures. The students will think overnight on their suggestions and ask other family members for input. The next day the teacher will help students connect their brainstormed ideas into the idea of a "diversity" fair. The teacher will introduce the authentic task of exploring the idea of community, culture and acceptance by investigating questions with the help of technology and university partners. Based upon the results of the brainstorming, teachers will group students into like groups of 3-4 students. Grouping may be based on similar cultures that wish to be investigated, similar questions about cultures or similar concerns about helping people get along. Each team will make a plan for the process they will use to gather information and decide which role each student will play in the group. It may be suggested to have one student act as researcher, one as recorder and one as communicator.
The teacher will guide the action planning and provide any necessary guidelines appropriate for their classroom. Over the next 2-4 weeks, students will be spending a portion of their day on this project. During the designated project time, students would be looking at materials associated with their cultural study, talking on line to university partners, viewing information available through teacher selected web sites or using e-mail to obtain more information for their study. Many of the resources that will be available to the students will have been pre-selected by the teacher ahead of time and checked to make sure they are appropriate to the age level. Examples of these resources include: books, CD rom references, internet sites bookmarked on the computer by the teacher, e-mail address exchanges pre-set up with university partners, etc. (If possible, a face-to-face meeting with university partners along the path of this study would be useful)
As the students gather the information, the teacher will continually ask them how to think about how they will be communicating their information to the audience at the diversity fair. Teacher may take time to brainstorm with students potential audience members and other specific facts about the diversity fair such as time, place, permission needed, volunteers from parents, advertising, etc. These additional tasks will then be delegated to each group for further work. Each group will practice their presentation with another classroom and take their critique ideas back for consideration with their group. Together with students from all groups, the class will begin to build a rubric which will be used to evaluate their presentation. This rubric can be handed out to audience members to get feedback on the diversity fair presentations. Parent volunteers can be used to take pictures of the diversity fair and these pictures along with descriptions of what students learned can be posted to the classroom or school web page.
Other classrooms around the country can access this page and learn more about the specifics of this project. If specific cultural guest speakers area available in the community they can also provide feedback to the students concerning their presentation and this feedback could also be posted on the web page. For more conversation on evaluation of this project, at a latter date in the school year, the local community civic association may come back into the classroom and discuss with the students any impact their project had on the community.
Created for the Fermilab
LInC program sponsored by Fermi National
Accelerator Laboratory Education Office
and Friends of Fermilab, and
funded by United States Department of Energy,
Illinois State Board of Education,
North Central Regional Technology in Education
Consortium which is operated by North Central
Regional Educational Laboratory (NCREL), and the National
Science Foundation.
Author(s): Sue Selbin
School: CESA #11, Turtle Lake, WI
Created: February 15, 2001 - Updated: April 18, 2001
URL: http://www-ed.fnal.gov/lincon/w01/projects/diversity/scenario.html