We open each session with a Conocimiento sharing activity (We are From poems) to give the participants a feeling of community and create a trusting environment. The “We are from” poems allow students to see their differences and similarities, and gives participants a feel for the people they will be communicating with during the course of the session.
Excerpts of We Are From Poems
"We are from the book fairs, art, Frida Kahlo and Coatepeque /
We are from the Clicas, Boogie Boards, and asphalt under our feet /We are from Grandma and Grandpa, 'Give me a kiss', and Mom."---Elementary School Students
“We are from where the president lives, the white house, the monuments / We are from the big chair, uptown, Ben’s Chili Bowl, U street, Southeast."--High School Students
"We represent, respect, and reflect on our past / Live and never forget / We are immigrants who migrated to the United States of America and became Black"--College Students
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When classes post items like the above “We are from” poems to the online campus, a project facilitator sends an email out to the listserv to let the participating educators know, so the site does not have to be checked daily for new postings.
Four activities from the Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching were selected for this online project: Big Shoes to Fill, What We Want, What We Believe, Painting a Picture of a Movement, and Where is the Activism in the Hip Hop Generation. Each classroom chose which lessons they wanted to participate in and were encouraged to integrate all four into their curriculum. After sharing the "We are from" poems, partnered classes scheduled times work on each activity and respond to one another's work.
The Big Shoes to Fill activity proved to be the most popular and created a lot of dialogue and postings on the online campus. This lesson examines how struggles for justice, equity, and freedom depend on traditions passed on and developed within communities and out of collective experience. Students consider the many kinds of steps that ordinary people can take to build solid pathways to greater human dignity and a more equitable world. The postings were very diverse in term of content and presentations. Some students wrote about leaders in various parts of the world who inspired their lives, others wrote about how they have created their own big shoes to fill by being the first in their family to attend college, some classes posted pictures, others artwork. Below are two sample big shoes from participants.
Educators were also invited to come up with their own lessons and post their students work in an innovations folder. For instance, Berkeley High School teacher Annie Johnston asked her students to interview local civil rights movement veterans, create a script from the interview, and turn this script into a documentary with images and sound through I-Movie software. These short films were posted on the network’s online campus. Through their participation in the Civil Rights Teaching Global Learning Network, Johnston and two students presented a workshop on this lesson at the Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner Living Memorial Civil Rights Education Summit.
Overall we found that students were excited to participate in this project because it allows them to publish their work beyond their school community. After the first session we created an online gallery of projects to emphasize the feeling of being published and importance of each students work. Educators who participated in the project were excited to be connected with one another and share lesson plans and ideas. For example a very experienced teacher involved in the network served as a mentor to a newer teacher, helping to create more dynamic and interactive lesson plans that got students to think critically about the Civil Right Movement. Other educators were really thankful for the opportunity to integrate technology into the classroom and through this project were able to plan creative ways to use technology to bring lessons on civil rights and other social issues to life.
