GeoNarratives

For educators and others: this post is intended as a beginning, a draft for a Gr. 11 student project design. Your feedback is welcome, particularly about communicating these lofty ideas to students so they can understand it, managing steps in the project so they don't get lost, assessment suggestions, and weblinks to examples of similar projects appreciated. I'll also be seeking "critical friends" feedback at Mumbleypeg 2013, an annual meeting of the Pacific Slope Consortium. Virtually all of the students at my school have conducted Heritage Projects or Echo Projects of one flavour or another in Social Studies 9, 10, or 11. This means that they have spent considerable time gathering evidence and stories about past cultures and locations, mainly ones within their own family. For my current group taking Geography 12 and English 11 together in the Language and Landscape Program, I want to provoke them to examine the role that geography played in those stories, and to engage in writing and other creative expression to deconstruct these narratives. We will be assigning a significant number of our learning outcomes to this project, and working through it off and on for about two months.

Enough preamble; here it is:

GeoNarratives: Cross-curricular Project-based Learning about People and Places

Each of us has rich stories in our past, stories that woven together with places. For some, it is the tale of our ancestors as they endured challenges that we can only imagine. For others, the people, places and stories are more immediate, still present within our lives. In all cases there is direct and indirect evidence hiding in language, food, and song, and written into physical and cultural landscapes. 

This project will require building a “geography” and creating a “narrative” -- specifically:

• heritage inquiry: taking the stories from your personal and cultural background and examining patterns, geographic relationships, and significance -- applying critical geographic thinking to an authentic context 
• creative non-fiction: writing and creating narratives based on research -- perhaps there is some short cross-over into historical fiction and personal myth-making, but at its heart is the telling of a story that connects to your heritage 
• embodiment: putting your senses, your artistic side, your physical presence into your research and presentation -- creative expressions of the parts of your research that you find most compelling 

 Aside from the critical thinking and creativity involved, some specific skills will be developed:

• careful use of technology: placing a digital stamp on this project -- use of an online portfolio, use of technology for research and/or expression, experimenting with something new 
• literature review and wordtake: surveying the reading and media that relates to your inquiry and using some of it to explore Self and Other, or global issues that impacted your own backstory

This is a broad framework created by your teacher, but it is important that you design the questions that will allow this to be meaningful to you. As your teacher, I can provide as much structure as you think you need to be successful with this project, including narrowing down your topics, suggesting courses of action, and helping you embed “benchmarks of geographic inquiry.” With all this in mind you are free to take this project in new directions, as long as we consider certain learning outcomes that are basic to English Language Arts and Geography, including a high standard for writing.

GeoNarratives at a glance -- considering the impact of geography on the stories from one’s past

The final presentation of your GeoNarrative will take in four parts:

1. sharing the part of your portfolio that shows your heritage research, literature review, and critical analysis (the conclusions you have made about both the topic and your learning)
2. sharing some or all of the creative non-fiction (or historical fiction) that you have built around your research 
3. sharing a performative piece that you made to express or symbolize the deep part of your learning during this project 
4. use of at least one effective of digital technology in the process of project creation or presentation 

Project Steps (not always in this sequence):

1. look at and assess example of creative non-fiction, heritage inquiry, and “geographies” 
2. develop questions and designs for your project 
3. accumulate primary and secondary evidence and conduct a variety of research 
4. co-develop aspects of your project and evaluation criteria with student groups and the teacher 
5. create the pieces that make up your project 
6. prepare the pieces for sharing, including presentation 
7. share and present your project 
8. reflection, celebration, and evaluation 

Examples of stories that would work well as GeoNarratives:

• immigration experiences, so different depending on location and time period 
• wartime from civilian or a soldier’s perspective 
• grandma’s garden, grandpa’s workshop; practicing bygone skills and trades 
• working on the land; pioneering and homesteading 
• outdoor lifestyles, a tradition of hunting or fishing 
• managing a farm and family, homemaking in the past 

Examples of global issues that could be examined within your project:

• a study of racism/tolerance, language acquisition, or labour market among new immigrants 
• evolving role and treatment of women in various places, cultures, and time periods 
• aboriginal ways of knowing and relationship between First Nations and the broader society 
• the power of wealth: studies of “class” and differences between rich and poor 
• citizenship, rights and democracy: how much freedom or “agency” did historic groups really have 
• the idea of sustainability and the relationship that different peoples have with the environment 
• grief and hope: how did historic groups cope with challenges (could tie in to religious studies) 

Examples of evidence that would support a GeoNarrative:

• non-fiction, documentaries, history books and websites, academic studies 
• novels, short stories, works of fiction and poetry from the time period and place that you are examining 
• artwork or crafts such as paintings, architecture, sketches, sculptures, carvings, jewelry, tools, heirlooms 
• primary evidence, journals, memoirs, recollections, artifacts, photographs, recipes, travelogues, interviews 
• genealogical websites, graveyards, government records, family history books 
• existing “human geography” connected to your topics (studies that parallel your inquiry), historical atlases

Examples of a performative piece:

• musical creation (e.g. write a song), interpretive dance, historical re-enactment, water colour painting, original poetry, food creation, a model or diorama, puppet show, simulation, class activity, video reflection, narrated slideshow, interactive display, build something

Examples of a digital stamp:

• use of QR codes to link to key evidence, like a reader’s guide for someone to understand your work 
• creating an attractive space in your digital portfolio to display some of your work (lots of applications to try for this one) 
• using video or computer animation for part of your project 
• conducting interviews via Skype and archiving part of it as portfolio evidence 
• use of social media for “curating” (assessing and organizing) research or telling/sharing a story

Examples of a projects that put together many strands of inquiry:

• Cigar-Box Project http://www.thinkinginmind.com/cigar-box-project/
• Seven Geography-themed projects from High Tech High http://www.hightechhigh.org/pbl/
• Learning Geography in the 21st Century http://mahara.umeedu.maine.edu/view/view.php?t=ymiKptgDcakl5JUIeJ1k
• Zombie-based learning - Geography curriculum http://www.zombiebased.com/

Note on the image at the top: this is a map of the Molotchna colony -- home to Mennonites who left Prussia to settle in this part of South Russia from the 1780s onwards.  After WWI and the Russian Revolution, many of these Mennonites fled to North America, including all four of my grandparents. One of my own GeoNarratives is very much connected to this time, place, and people.

the burger bash

3rd annual D.P. Todd year-end Burger Bash

How does your school end the year for the students? A nice three hour exam? Unreturned book fees? I suppose these will be with us for some time to come, a little pain for some gain. I would argue that exams can still be about assessing meaningful learning rather than ranking the little darlings. The exam pressure isn't all bad, it brings out some interesting resolve in students that is sometimes absent earlier in the month.  Some kind of final assessment clears away any doubts about whether a student is ready for next level and gives a few of them a final chance to establish that they've met the learning outcomes.

Three years ago, our school's bon vivant Socials teacher turned Culinary Arts teacher Mr. Ian Leitch hatched a plot for doing away with anything resembling an exam. He came up with a twofold assessment to allow his Cafeteria students to demonstrate their learning and celebrate their accomplishment.  The first part assesses individual competency and involves the documentation of a multi-course meal the student prepares for their families. Each step is justified, explained, and prepared with care, often tapping into cultural themes and family favorites that have significance for the student and his/her family. Back in class the student shares the story, pictures, and photos of how it went, complete with family evaluation. Assessment measures performance and learning re outcomes, but it also places a value on the work and personal learning that students self-describe (ultimately more lasting  than learning based on external standards).

Mr. Leitch's Cafeteria students work hard all year to provide amazing, healthy, tasty meals 2-3 times a week for a school that has no cafeteria, no industrial kitchen, not even a place for kids to sit and eat lunch. Carts of food scuttle down the halls in anticipation of lunchtime to the little snack counter that serves as a staging area for food service. The creative (sometimes experimental) student-designed meals are served up to about a third of our 750 students, who line up with $4 and a hunger for artfully arranged offerings such as 1) pulled pork on bannock with with cole slaw, 2) New York steak on a potato tart with prawns and sundried tomato cream reduction, 3) trio of Indian dishes (based on a student's parents' wedding meal), 4) garden veg sandwich with aged cheddar and mango chutney on foccacia. Etc! Stuff that Veg would be proud of.

The Cafeteria course uses some great blended learning -- student time is divided between classroom based lessons, independent group meetings, food prep, food service, and other work. They have a regular block, some of which they need to attend (not all of it in their foods classroom), some of which is optional, and they also give up some of their lunchtime. There is also an expectation for online/mobile contributions, e.g. recipe development, check-in with their group and teacher, and facebook promotion of their lunchtime food service. In my mind this is the right "blend" for blended learning -- the face-to-face time is very structured and involves powerful teaching, the independent work is group-based to provide accountability, and the online work makes the other parts go better and doesn't require students to be zoned out in front of a computer. They call their program/operation "Te Amo" (Spanish for "I love you," which was what one of our exchange students said when he tasted their food for the first time in 2010). The teacher is compensated with two teaching blocks for a single class, which recognizes that he gives up most lunches and spends parts of his evenings picking up food orders, stocking, and working with student groups face-to-face or by mobile phone. I'd call that a "flipped classroom" but this is becoming common enough now that we have to start seeing it as part of the spectrum and not a reversal of old-school teaching and learning.

Watching Mr. Leitch teach is a pleasure -- he opens up their thinking and senses to how important food is in our culture, our lives, our emotional and physical health, and brings them, step by step, to a place where they create beautiful dishes that could be served in restaurants. His manner is so full of joy and respect, inclusive without pandering and humorous without losing focus, and always about the students being their best. Mauri Bell, a dynamic Ed Assistant connected to the class and program acts as sous chef and negotiator/facilitator on the long list of duties performed by students, in addition to working with some special kids in the program. The class structure runs very much like a professional kitchen, with students rotating through important roles from dishes to top chef. They have "iron chef competitions," hour-long intense workshops on single ingredients, student submitted food "problems" to solve (e.g. how to turn a family recipe into an event production line), some keynotes on process and safety, and group accountability for pulling off orders, planning, and production. They even made cheese.

The second part of Mr. Leitch's course wrap-up benefits the whole school and assesses teamwork, very important in a program that will/does lead many into the food service industry. At the end of June, the Te Amo Caf students form groups and design the ultimate burger -- secret sauces, the right cheese, crazy good toppings, and usually a special twist. They build a demo burger, photograph it, market it around the school, and sell tickets to buy them. A bit of friendly competition and a chance for them to act and talk about food to the whole school they way they have been doing in class. How's that for a final exam? The rest is pure anticipation and celebration. In the staff room, teachers are going on about which burger(s) they have bought tickets for, talking about what the students said to convince them to buy it. On the last day, the grill is going before the last class is out... of course the doors are open and my hallway is filling with the smell of cooked meat, so much for my lesson plan! The burgers are cooked on one grill, and each team has a station out on the grass to assemble their prized creation for all the students who picked their burger from the others.

Our school's leadership class (Mr. Balazs) teams up to coordinate the rest of the burger bash. The yearbooks are ready for distribution, and are given out as the students end the last class. Our admin team has dragged big tables out to the fields, and the students pour out to wait for their burgers and sign yearbooks. We've done this for three years now and it is so cool to see the interactions and conversations. Signing a yearbook brings out some pent-up sentiment in everybody. From signing big Canadian flags for our exchange students, or listening to the music DJ'd by our talented leadership students, the event had a great vibe. I want to use the words joy and respect, even if these don't normally fit with the idea of a year-end party (you'd think some of them would want to break stuff and get the heck out). The students left the field after a couple of hours, not even much to clean up (although our admin and the leadership students were there for that, too).  The first year we did this, it struck such a need that we finally had to ask kids to think about going home at 6:00 after they had talked, danced to the music, and signed yearbooks for 3 hours.

This year was no different -- joy and respect (perhaps modelled by their Culinary Arts teacher) were what the students delivered. I had the Royal... it had a spicy honey garlic sauce, monterey jack cheese, and pineapple. A bit messy but tasted fantastic. The mix of food, conversation, sunny skies, and yearbooks also provided some serendipity, neat encounters that don't happen elsewhere. I heard one student, while signing the yearbook of another, say "I didn't really get to know you that well this year, it was nice talking to you." Lots of hugs and laughs and teens being teens, but no booze or funny business, go figure. I was especially pleased this year to be asked to sign the yearbooks of a few special students whose progress and resilience I really admire. Some of our students are rough around the edges, including a bunch of kids that take Mr. Leitch's Cafeteria class, but you'd never know it from watching them at the burger bash. Your teachers are proud of you.

A very nice way to end the year, even if there is that other messy business -- a few exams to take the edge off the post-burger-bash glow.  Thanks Mr. Leitch, Ms. Bell, Te Amo crew, staff and students for a great finish.

refreshing/reminding

I've had two experiences in my Socials 10 classes in the last week that have refreshed my perspective and reminded me of how important a role student inquiry plays in meaningful learning.

1) I was talking about generational differences and used my parents/their grandparents as examples. I asked a few student to volunteer evidence and soon everyone was turning to a neighbour and chatting. I was about to enter "teacher-mode" and get everyone to shut up so I could move on to my next point when I realized they were doing exactly what they should... making connections between curriculum and identity, between suggested learning and prior knowledge... they were, literally every one of them, swapping stories from their family about heritage skills, traditions, history. I stopped my "interference" and walked away for a few minutes.

2) I tried a "pioneer experience" role-play in class and the students went wild with it... they're 2 hours into it now and are still enthusiastic about making deals, banding together, selling off their children, trading a plough for 5 muskets, swapping blacksmithing for cobbling. etc. Both classes would have kept this up for days. Chaos, noise, no props at all, just imagination and conversation and pretty much everyone is "on task" with making connections between curriculum and identity. A wealth of unexpected and powerful outcomes. A real treat from a generation that is stereotyped as lacking imagination and having no attention span.

Muslim Enlightenment

I'm coming to the end of Ali's book on fundamentalism(s) and he is carefully trying to explain how, as a critic of religion and believer in Enlightenment values, he can nonetheless sound the call for a much-needed Reformation within Islam... his take on the nature of this justification struck me:

"The Enlightenment attacked religion - Christianity, mainly - for two reasons: that it was a set of ideological delusions, and that it was a system of institutional oppressions, with immense powers of persecution and intolerance. Why then should I abstain from religious criticism?" ch.22/p337

After a thoroughly eye-opening and depressing read about political corruption, slaughter, rape, theft, and mayhem in the Middle East and elsewhere, some by fundamentalists, some by imperialists, some by murderous power-mongers, I am glad to get to the bit where he looks with some hope towards the future. He bemoans the lack of Nobel Prizes in the Muslim world , the lack of political, philosophical, and religious debate that was once present in Islam and was so powerful in shaking up Europe. He speculates on the chance to skip right past the neo-liberal global agenda for commodification enabled by "modernity" and move on to something new... if only Islam could open up real debate and scholarship and separate state and mosque.

I expected to learn a great deal about the layers of Muslim society past and present... blown away by this actually. I also hoped to read a different perspective on 911. One of the unexpected outcomes, though, is the idea that someone who has stripped their faith of religion and embraced humanist ideals still has a valid perspective on religion. This is obvious to most people, I'm sure (that the reformed/deformed can and should engage the rest) but it is often these simple ideas that grab me, give me something to build on.

To be fair to Ali's thesis, he makes pains to show how religion is most often the vehicle or instrument of oppression rather than the ultimate cause, especially in the case of American fundamentalism, which lies beneath the surface throughout many if its international blood-lettings (I'll save that for another post)...

"Exploiters and manipulators have always used religion self-righteously to further their own selfish ends. It's true that this is not the whole story. There are, of course, deeply sincere people of religion in different parts of the world who genuinely fight on the side of the poor, but they are usually in conflict with organised religion themselves. The Catholic Church victimised worker or peasant priests who organised against oppression. The Iranian Ayatollahs dealt severely with Muslims who preached in favour of a social radicalism." ch.22/p.329

I am reminded of how education on climate change, peace, and women's rights, and HIV/Aids (to name a few) still have an uphill fight within evangelical denominations in Canada. In the Mennonite Brethren church I grew up in, the environmental movement throughout the 1980s and 90s was considered "New Age" (of this world, or Satan), something to be viewed with suspicion. On the question of peace, a telling example came with the first Gulf War in 1990. How would this war for oil be met by our belief in non-resistance and the stance of non-participation? After some pressure for some kind of response, a prayer meeting was held - not to ask for peace or and end to conflict, certainly not to condemn violence or examine causes - but to wish Bush, Sr. and other leaders wisdom as they made tough decisions. It marked a key moment in the church -- Anabaptist peace theology got locked in the closet. On the question of rights, the same church continues to bar women from serving as elders (trustees), in violation of it's own Conference principles (from 1985 to the present) and probably the Charter of Rights. The subject of gay rights & acceptance wouldn't even make it past the front doors (please please someone prove me wrong on any of this). I am sure this and others evangelical churches do remarkable things, and that most individual attenders might not even realize these issues exist in their midst, but if they want to rise above the history of institutional oppression, they need to collectively engage with tough issues in the world they presume to affect (start with peace and equality).

So... adieu Tariq Ali... I will never think about Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, India, Indonesia, Israel, or the United States the same way again.

carts of darkness

A student reminded me about this one... I remember it was in the news a couple of years ago, some controversy over the ethics of making a film about high-speed homeless cart-riders in North Van. Anyways, here is the full movie -- http://www.nfb.ca/film/carts_of_darkness/ --shorter clips are also available on youtube.

Anthem in N.B.

You've seen the story? I caught a video story on this again last night, too. A New Brunswick elementary principal (Millet, see pic) decided (with his staff's support) to stop playing the Canadian anthem every morning in response to "inclusion" concerns from some parents. Another parent fired back, making it a patriotism/support our troops issue, her daughter likes the anthem as it reminds her cousin who died in Afghanistan. The principal suggests that the anthem can be played at regular assemblies; the daughter can even lead in O Canada. But... the principal is vilified by his community (threats of violence) and the press (making it out to be a ban on the anthem), thousands of calls and emails (including death threats), even Conservative MPs put on their pointy white Reform hats in Commons and stand up to condemn the principal for his unCanadian actions. To top it off, his N.B. school district superintendant overrules his decision (even though it was a school choice to begin with to play the anthem daily) and the education minister is considering mandating the anthem in all schools.

In my mind, having an anthem played to children every day (just like the Lord's Prayer or American pledge of allegiance, etc.) is a form of indoctrination, a propaganda technique that fits a totalitarian or nationialistic regime but not Canada. I admire quirky rituals and chance to sing in public, but once in a while is fine for flag-waving and musical salutes. I am a creature of the earth on which I was born, a citizen of humanity, a plant grown in a Canadian ecosystem. I do not have to be patriotic to love certain Canadianisms, nor is "country" always right (although it could be always wrong). My wife jokes that Maritimers are messed up with each other and cruel to the "different" and blind to change when it is needed... too bad the "attackers" on this issue fit the stereotype. I am disgusted with the people who trashed the principal (especially the neocon/nutter-mother and the ball-less superintendant) and used ignorant 19th century arguments to do so. I wish we could find him a job in our district... he seemed completely broken on the news last night.

Quatchi, Miga, and Sumi

What do you think of the 2010 mascots? Compare them with some "winners" from past olympics.