As a former history teacher I have an ongoing interest in how young people think about the past. I am particularly interested in understanding how they think about themselves in relation to the past – and how educators might tap into those ideas to help make history and social studies curricula more engaging and personally […]
Until recently I was the Head of Social Studies at Crofton House School in Vancouver, Canada. This fall I take up the position of Assistant Principal at Bodwell High School, also in Vancouver. In the first of two blog posts, I reflect on what I and my 11th grade students gained from participating in the […]
In a previous post I described how participating students interviewed someone from their neighborhood aged 50 years or older (TAPPING INTO THE KNOWLEDGE AND PERSPECTIVES OF NEIGHBORS). In those interviews students gained a new perspective on their neighborhoods. They also learned about and from the life stories of those they interviewed. Given that students were […]
Stories can galvanize and inspire, soothe and amuse, root us in memories, and create bonds. Some stories we carry with us from lively conversations around campfires or cafeteria tables; some have their genesis in generations past, and are given to us by our families and communities. But how do our individual stories relate to the […]
As you may recall, as part of our project we asked students to create maps of their neighborhoods and to take a walk with the aim of looking at their surroundings with fresh eyes (see blog entries PHOTOGRAPHING NEIGHBORHOODS AS A CATALYST FOR LEARNING, SLOW LOOKING, and MAPPING NEIGHBORHOODS). As a follow up activity, and […]
One feature of our learning community is that it brings together young people from around the world to consider issues that are relevant to all humanity. Although we have a range of ages represented in our pilot study, the majority of participants are in their mid to late teens: an age when young people are […]
As noted by Shari Tishman in a previous blog post called SLOW LOOKING, we asked students to capture a couple of photographs as they took a walk around their neighborhoods. Here is an excerpt from the instructions we gave them: Paul pays a lot of attention to objects and what they reveal about the people […]
We asked students in their first Edmodo post to indicate what they found most interesting or exciting about Paul’s walk and this project. We gave examples of their comments in this post: STUDENTS’ HOPES FOR PAUL’S WALK. Dami Seung, a master’s student in the Arts in Education program here at the Harvard Graduate School of […]
Just as Paul is engaged in “slow journalism”, we are also trying to carve out a space that encourages slow looking and slow learning. By slow we don’t mean boring or without challenge. Rather, our goal is to encourage students to pause for a while in their hectic schedules to look long and closely at […]
In an earlier post , I shared an outline of the broad themes we are tackling in this pilot study phase of our learning community. In this post I would like to share some specific examples of student work. First, here are the instructions we gave students for the second prompt. Jessica Fei, a HGSE […]
Out of Eden Learn Blog 