Sample Story

Exhibit Story “Future Learning Scenario”

Please review the following story. This is an example of how a typical teacher may approach teaching in the future. The specific topics may change, but the general pedagogical themes would remain the same. This story is being used as part of the design process in the design of the Future Learning Environments Exhibit. 

Marcia Martinez is a teacher in a multi age group classroom of 9 and 10 year olds (traditionally 4^th and 5^th graders).  Marcia taught at an urban middle class school in a major metropolitan area.  Marcia is trying to apply the theories of Constructivism and Multiple Intelligences in her classroom along with using her understanding of learning styles.  To achieve this she is basing her curriculum development process on the Project Approach.

Marcia observed that her students were very interested in the different cultures of the people in the community in which the school was set.  There were many different delis and ethnic restaraunt as well as mayy diverse looking people and dress.  She decided to do a project that would let her students study the different cultural people places and things that they were encountering everyday.

Marcia talked to her students about this topic to get their ideas about what they wanted to know about the topic of “Diverse Cultures”.  By doing a KWL chart, she found that the children were very interested in the  1) visual differences between cultures (including architectural differences, personal/body differences, clothing/textile differences, cultural art). 2. Differences in cultural artifacts (art, food, religion, utensils) 3. Languages (letter forms, the sound of the language, meanings of words, cultural songs)  4. Music  5. History  - (oral histories/stories, personal histories, formal history).

Now that Marcia knew what the children wanted to know and what they were interested in learning about she set to the task of developing an initial experience to engage the children’s natural curiosity so that they would want to learn all that they could about their topic of “Cultures”.  Since the school was located in a diverse area of a major urban metropolitan area, Marcia decided that a walking tour of a 5 block area around the school would provide the perfect interaction with the sub-topics that she wanted the children to explore.  In that 5 block radius there were numerous ethnic restaurants, architecture, and people to allow the students to have significant interaction on the diverse cultures around them every day.

Before she took the children on the tour there were a few preparations that needed to be made.  Marcia had access to a digital camera and had planned on using that to document the children’s journey around the neighborhood.  However she also felt that she could give the children a richer experience if the children each had their own camera to use.  She wrote the children’s parents and asked them to purchase a 27 exposure disposable film camera (these are available for as little at $4.99) for their child.  The children would also take their palm devices to allow them to take notes on what they saw, a gps device (one per class) so they could mark the location of each interesting site and where they took the picture, a few small digital voice recorders, and a paper and pencil and a sketch pad to allow them to draw some of the things they saw (if a parent forgets to send a camera with a student Marcia had planned on making those children the designated sketchers so they don’t feel left out.

The week before the journey, Marcia had a group discussion with the children.  In this group the class came up with questions that they could ask different people on the street that they met (that would be recorded on the digital voice recorder).  She also discussed some of the things that they might want to specifically see or look for in the neighborhood.  She also went over the use of the cameras and discussed how to decide what was important to take pictures of. 

After this discussion she contacted some of the businesses in the neighborhood to see if they would be willing to allow the children to tour their building and talk to them.  She got a lot of positive response from the people she contacted and was especially intrigued by a photo processing business that agreed to give her a discount on the photo processing.  She asked if he could show them how film is developed and the owner gave her a resounding yes.  Marcia scheduled a time for the tour and demonstration 2 days after the general tour.

On the day of the tour, several parent volunteers accompanied the students as they photographed, interviewed, sketched, mapped, and took notes on their community.  The children saw and met many diverse peoples.  The last place they went to was the photo processing store where they dropped off their cameras for development.  Back in the classroom the students were brimming with excitement about all the data that they had collected.  Marcia discussed the experience with them and began to ask them what they could do next to learn more about cultures and how they could present that information to the rest of the class and to their parents.  The children decided that making a museum type exhibit that included different clothing, art, architecture, music, history and language.  The children also suggested that they make food from different cultures and serve those to the people coming to their museum.  They also wanted to study and present the many different ways that people look like.  For this they were going to make a photo montage of the many different types of skin color, hair styles, and other cultures.

The children decided that they would develop committees to work on the different exhibits in their museum.  Marcia and the students decided that each child should be on at least 3 committees and handed out a sheet to the children that asked for their preferences as to what committee they wanted to be on.  She collected this information and then had the student’s tally the information collected on the preference sheets and asked them to construct a way to assign people to committees using the data.  It took the children a while and a lot of debate, but they finally came up with an acceptable method of assigning children to the groups.

The committees were Clothing, Personal traits, Art, Architecture, Food, Music, History and Language.  Marcia spent the week developing a curriculum around their investigations.  She took the standards that were developed for her state and used those to guide the children’s discoveries and investigations. 

The children spent about 2 hours a day working on their projects and in their committees to develop their exhibits.  During this time Marcia made sure to emphasize reading, writing and math.  However the whole day was not consumed with the project work.  Mary had to plan for history/social studies, math, reading and science lessons.  However Marcia found that by incorporating aspects of the project into these lessons, the children were more interested because they actually could see how this applied to their learning.  Marcia used foods in her science lessons, she talked about the history of different cultures in America in her history lessons, and she had children read stories that helped them gain an understanding of diverse cultures.  The classroom topic helped to give these academic subjects more meaning to the children.

The children worked for 6 weeks on this project.  When they toured the photo plant they learned a lot about photo processing (which Marcia also incorporated into her science lessons).  They were all impressed with their pictures and put them to good use.  During their tour the children had collected names, email, and phone numbers of some people and had created a database on the classroom computer they now recontacted them to ask them more questions via email to ask them more questions about their culture.  The more the children learned, the more they wanted to learn.

When their exhibit was completed it contained digital materials, audio stories from many of their contacts, pictures of art and architecture, maps of their community with pictures and locations of different establishments, and the food was exceptional.  When it was all done, Marcia realized that many of the skills that the students demonstrated were above their grade level.  She was able to identify not only the grade level standards but also benchmarks from 6^th and 7^th grade standards that the children had achieved.