My explorative adventures in the new curriculum have recently had me focusing on the goals of the Social Responsibility Core Competency:
- Students develop and maintain diverse, positive peer and intergenerational relationships in a variety of contexts.
- Students develop awareness and take responsibility for their social, physical, and natural environments by working independently and collaboratively for the benefit of others, communities, and the environment.
Ok, so I haven’t been focusing on the environment part, but the rest is true.
I have purposely been focusing on this relationship-community-collaborative piece with my English 10 class. Why them?
- smallish class (16) makes it easier;
- grade 10 is an awesome grade to teach (and experiment on) because they’ve matured a little beyond the “I’m in grade 8 so my job is drain every ounce of energy out of you” stage, but haven’t yet reached the annoying senior “everything stresses me out and I’m too old and cool for school and you can’t make me” stage yet;
- this particular group is kind of awesome (though a little strange—but that’s okay because I like the nutty kids)
- the “Composition” part of their English credit has encouraged me to really work on the writing process, with a particular focus on peer feedback (sounds downright like community learning, right?)
- the “New Media” part of their English credit has encouraged me to really focus on the creative and collaborative potential of technology. Yay!
Yes, you heard me right: technology is increasing opportunity for enhancing the relationship-community-collaborative thingy we’ve got going on. T’is the great digital paradox. It’s easy to disappear behind a screen and hide from real people. But it’s equally easy to expand your possibilities for interacting with other people.
A simple example is a little exercise we did that I creatively named “Cool Stuff on the Internet.” Each student had to find something (school appropriate) that they loved on the internet and share it with the class. It could be a meme, a viral video, a game, a website, a bizarre Instagram. The result was a lot of shared laughter and conversation (and just plain dumbstruck awe over the ridiculousness of what we love on the internet). A definite sense of community.
They are also writing blogs. It takes bravery for an adolescent to put themselves out there and share their work publicly. The first step in helping them do this is the shared experience in the classroom of creating their work, helping each other make it better, and then supporting each other as they publish. A definite sense of community.
Recently we have engaged in our greatest project yet: collaborating with kindergarten students from the neighbouring school to create children’s stories. It has been a really awesome process (which I will describe in length next time), but despite initial nerves (and typical teenage complaining), it has quite simply been magical. They have worked together on three occasions, and as a team (grade 10s and kindergarteners) have created a series of stories that can now easily be shared. The technology is the facilitator in that it allows us to take the young children’s drawings and insert them alongside the text written by my high school students and create books, that will be both shared digitally and printed so the elementary school can have a copy.
But the magic isn’t in the book. The magic isn’t in the pdf that the children can easily share with their grandparents who live far away (though that’s pretty nifty). The magic is in watching them work together. Watching the kindergarteners lean on the grade 10s as the stories were read. Watching the grade 10s give direction and encouragement as the kindergarteners brought the stories to life. Watching the older students take responsibility for the comfort, feelings and work of the younger kids. Watching the relationships develop. “Positive peer and intergenerational relationships.” A definite sense of community.
And I never would have thought of doing this if not for the iPad. It truly amplified my creativity and amplified my students’ ability to connect and collaborate with others. We’re not lost behind a screen. We’re taking that screen out of the classroom and using it to connect.
