(During the spring semester, Bethany's EDUC500 class planned and ran a special Book to Art Series focused on social justice. Their goal was to put theory about teaching for social justice into practice. As part of the project, students wrote blog posts reflecting on the experience. This week, guest bloggers Julie and Eddy talk about the experience of MC-ing the special series)
How are you all feeling? Nervous?” Our Professor, who has run Book to Art numerous times asked our small group of prospective teachers fifteen minutes before the students arrived. I wasn’t bluffing when I said, “I’m feeling pretty good!” I mean, for a group of ten college students with varying amounts of classroom experience, we proved (during our practice run) that we would be effective at running a dialogue with elementary aged students about immigration.
We had spent class the week before running a mock run-through. We took turns and switched roles between our teaching roles and modeling how a student might behave. Such behaviors included interrupting or sharing something off topic. Through it all we appeared calm, comfortable, professional, and practiced.
We had spent the semester in a weekly seminar learning about social justice pedagogies and planning a three session afterschool club where students read and discussed a picture book and made an art project. Our class chose to focus the series on immigration to shed light on how immigration impacts everyone in very different ways throughout time. My classmate, Julie, and I, Eddy, were the emcees for this series. We introduced and wrapped up each day and set the expectations for the three sessions.
We decided to plan a mini-lesson where Julie, I, and the students would create a baseline knowledge about immigration before reading any of the books. Freiere’s vision of dialogue from Pedagogy of the Oppressed inspired the model we used to do this. He says, “...through dialogue...the teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow” (Freire, 26). Julie and I wanted to create an environment where everyone felt comfortable sharing what they know and asking questions to co-create knowledge, especially since immigration is such an important topic. We decided to ask open ended questions and allow the children to drive the discussion. If they asked a question or needed to clarify something, we prepared language for that.
On the first day, before reading, we began by asking the students for a definition of immigration, why people might immigrate, and where could they immigrate to America from. We were surprised by their eagerness to hear from us. They had, after all, volunteered their time to come sit, listen to a story, engage in discussion, and create art. We were blown away (perhaps we should not have been) by the responses we received. Not only did they nail most of the vocabulary terms, their short and concise answers were more profound and correct than we could have made on our own.
When I asked the question, “Who knows what immigration is?” Hands shot up around the circle. One girl explained, “Immigration is when people come to the U.S. from other places.” Another hand shot to the sky, “People can immigrate to other places, too!” The students let us know, with this brief exchange, that they were engaged and eager to learn. They understood that people could immigrate for a variety of reasons such as a job or feeling unsafe and that immigrants came from and go to all over.
When we asked where people might immigrate from, one student answered by naming whole continents, like ‘Africa’, instead of countries. Seeking to avoid generalizations, Julie noted that Africa was a continent rather than a country, and asked the other children if they could think of countries within Africa instead. Through conversation, the children found they were able to speak more specifically about places.
In the end, I was right to not be nervous. The children were more than able to have discussions adults sometimes think are too complex for them. They displayed a knowledge that exceeded what either of us had at their age. Additionally, the students demonstrated that they felt comfortable in the environment by willingly offering answers to the questions. These students clearly showed that children have the potential to hold complicated conversations beyond what we initially expected
Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York, NY: Penguin.
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