Day 4 Reflection

For today, we attempted to incorporate students' uncompleted artworks of making protesting poster from Monday's class to our main activity of role-play in which used Dr. Seuss's book titled "Oh, the Places You'll Go!". For the first 30-40 minutes, we asked students to develop more specific ideas of global issues that they wanted to address through their posters (as a group or individually). Other than one group, students made one poster for each group. The global issues that they addressed through the poster were gun control, racism, human right, war & conflicts and etc. Their thoughts expressed in the art pieces were much more sophiscated and critical than I expected. The group that draw poster against gun control expressed gun tied by rope. They said they did not want to argue that we should prevent all people from owning guns for any cases. Instead, they argued that we should tighten our gun control laws in a way that keeps people with mental problems or any suspecious people from getting guns easily. Another group that I got impressed was the one in which touched on the problem of language use that reflects racism. Language or terms often used reflects one's thoughts or one society's discourses. Therefore, it was quite impressive for me to see that the group of students attempted to touch on the problem of using terms that disregarded someone based on his/her race as an important issue and expressed the efforts to resolve the problems with a grave in which they buried the term. Lastly, one student from the group in which worked individually shared his poster that addressed African American people's human right through the phrase of Black Lives Matter and the list of dead people who were killed by police. He made sure that the phrase of Black Lives Matter did not mean that the lives of people who have colors only matters. Instead, he said, he wanted to emphasize all lives matter regardless of colors.  Another comment from him that was so powerful to us was that he wanted to express the need of consideration for equity instead of equality through his poster. Listening to all thoughts about their artworks, I found that they all achieved the goals that three of us (facilitators) intended, which was helping students broaden and widen their perspectives to multiple perspectives and be critical about contemporary issues. I was so proud of our students.

We have not completed our activity with regard to the Dr. Sesus's book. But, basically, what we were trying to do was incorporating the messages that were delivered through their posters into the stories and let them express as role-play or making any objects of Dr.Sesus's characters. We will continue to do this work tomorrow and I will add more thoughts to this blog.

Day 1 Reflection

Day 1:

The focus of today's session our group (Group 2: Minds, bodies, and voices) had was helping students explore a various types of global issues in our contemporary society and experience and feel how those issues are interconnected with each other. We started with class discussion with several facilitating questions such as "what do you think global issues are", "what kinds of global issues you can think of", how is certain global issue is connected to the other such as global warming - food. Then, we encouraged students to have pair discussion with questions that focused more on how the global issues affect my lives such as "what global issue do you feel the most important", "why is that important to you", "what experiences have you faced in your life related to this issue" and so on. Then, when we get back to the class discussion, we asked how the global issue discussed in one pair is related to the global issue discussed in another pair.

Actually, these class discussion and pair activities were designed for doing the next main activity of "Web of global issues" smoothly. The essence of the activity is letting students make a statement that show connections among global issues. While we worked on the lesson plan for this activity, we were concerned about.."what if students can't come up with a statement that can make connections among the global issues". However, today's class turned out to be really fantastic particularly in terms of students' active discussion and engagement. I got really surprised to see and hear that how the students deeply and critically thought about many types of global issues. We took the activity of "Web of global issues" out as we could see that they did really great in seeing the connections among the global issues.

Especially, I got impressed with their critical perspectives on many global issues. I even asked Teresa whether these are the typical American students' discussion quality. She said no. They were definitely outstanding. Plus, I really liked the ways they make a sense of community by sharing their thoughts freely on any topics. I appreciated to have them in our class. I was feeling that I learned a lot from them. I could also see that many students truly enjoyed the class. In fact, several of them said this class was the best class and the most fun class they had as they were allowed to share their thoughts freely instead of just listening to teachers' thoughts. So rewarding and informative experience ever!
Can't wait to see them tomorrow!

Global issues viewed through protests

Global Issues Viewed through Protests

<2014 Hong Kong Protests>

BBC: The Key Players

Time: Hong Kong Divided over Plans for Patriotic Lessons in Schools

Education Policy Talk (International Perspective and Debates): The Controversies of Moral, Civic, and National Education in Hong Kong

Tuesday Diversity Quilt

DIVERSITY QUILTS FOR INTERNATIONAL WEEK

(Source from Kid Word Citizen)

Last year, for our International Week, we sent home a square of colored construction paper to all of the students at our elementary school with the instructions to “share something about your family’s culture: something you celebrate together, something you enjoy to do together, something that represents you and your family.” We got a lot of positive feedback that lots of the kids worked with their parents to come up with what they thought represented their family (I know that we did!). We gave each class a different color, and then put all of the classes in a grade together to make a quilt:

What’s great about a collaborative project such as this, is that the entire school can participate (K through 5th), and the colorful, school-wide display unites the students and staff. As kids walked through the hallways, they were admiring other quilt squares, and marveling at the details that some of the kids put into their squares. I wish I would have taken more pictures- some of the squares were incredible!!! The kids were allowed to use colored pencils, markers, crayons, cut out pictures from magazines, use real photographs, words, images- whatever they wanted to use to represent their families. The older grades had the kids write out a paragraph on the backs explaining their choices. The younger grades had the kids get up in front of the class and talk about what images the chose and why.

What I loved was their ability to mix the cultures they were part of. For example, this child appears to be Puerto Rican, but also belongs to Texas culture (evidenced of the rodeo pictures and Texas flag and map). There were quilt squares that showed scenes of Eid alongside a football and an American flag; squares divided into parts showing multiple ethnicities like Mexico and Chinese; squares that showed a Christmas tree and a Buddha.

The end product are diversity quilts that are colorful and extremely detailed, showing the intricate cultural fabric from which our school and community is woven. Students can pick out others’ squares in their class (because each class has the same color) and pick out their grades overall quilt, and also enjoy the differences between each grade. We hung up the diversity quilts during International Week, and during the Open House families were able to view the quilts that lined the hallways. It was such a wonderful representation of our school, and visual depiction of how distinct traditions can coexist beautifully side-by-side.

[Snapshot] About Me

Hello, Balfour Scholars

Welcome to Balfour Scholars Pre-college Academy. My name is Mina, one of your facilitators. I am currently a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in the program of Curriculum Studies at School of Education in Indiana University. Before coming to IU, I spent five years working in public education as a nationally licensed elementary school teacher in South Korea. At IU, I worked as an Associate Instructor with the role of supervisor for the K495 Teaching All Learners (TAL) Field Experience Program and this experience got me interested in and familiarized with teaching in the unique and diverse environments of the U.S. classroom. In addition, this experience influenced on building my research interest in improving the quality of democracy in international contexts via citizenship education and curriculum reform by taking comparative and sociocultural perspectives. 

Based on my teaching and research expertise, I would like us to have enjoyable and productive time to critically think about the following three themes with various artistic approaches: 1) Global Citizenship, 2) Westernization, & 3) Indigenous Knowledge. These three themes are worthwhile to be discussed for us to be global citizens in this interconnected era and ultimately improve the quality of democracy. What a certain society values as ideal often gets taught in its schools, and what and how students are taught often results in students developing certain ideals and values. Consequently, the meaning of democracy varies depending on common social values; rather than utilizing Western narratives of democracy within all societies, therefore, each society’s values should be examined in order to develop the best ways of educating for democracy in those specific contexts. At the end of the program, I hope, you will feel that democracy and desirable citizen in different parts of this globe should be understood from social and cultural perspectives. 

I look forward to working with you, global citizens!