JOURNAL #9
#OurStoriesUniteUs
JOURNAL #9
4/2/22
This week I want to reflect on our peer teaching project and the experience of creating a lesson plan with my team and teaching our lesson plan. This week, myself and my two co-teachers, Daniel and Malea, taught our peer teaching project on the social justice topic of immigration. The project's objective was to make a mural/mosaic about a social justice issue that included technology and integrative strategies. Writing and then teaching our project was so informative and rewarding. Without going into every little exacting detail of the project, I would like to focus on the highlights and its relationship to the result.
This isn't to say that there weren't things I wanted to change about our presentation/class. I would have done my art presentation differently, possibly starting with a warm up (it was hard getting back to school after the Spring break) and going outside to see the mural/mosaic space to get the peer students excited would have helped warm/wake up. After the completion of the mural/mosaic I wanted to spend more time outside talking about the relationships between the colors and symbols. I wanted to talk about populations that may not be represented and how we can explore their experiences. I also wanted to explore other social justice topics that are related to immigration, leading us to think about future projects. I wanted to talk about the migrations of culture and foods. For example: When we think of Italy, we think of pizza and pasta with tomato sauce. It is so ingrained into Italian culture that we don't even question it. However, tomatoes are from the Americas and weren't introduced to Europe until 1521. (It also probably took some years to popularize tomatoes and incorporate them into Italian culture). Noodles also came originally from Asia through the Silk Road. Something that we identify as being so Italian, really had roots with the movement of food and people- forever and deeply changing cultures and identities. Due to the weather, we decided as a team to cut the talks short and move them inside.
During the project, we had three ideation portions to explore our own relationships to emigration, migration and immigration. The first ideation was to explore symbols and silhouettes related to the stories of our families. The second ideation was relating complex stories with color psychology. These first two ideation projects were to think of the positives, gains and strengths of what immigrants bring and what they themselves may gain. Our third ideation was to explore the sadness, losses and hardships when someone leaves their country behind to move to another. This could be the challenges of resources and war, violence and poverty, leaving family and culture behind. It can also be the challenges of starting in a new country, language barriers, accessibility, jobs, housing, safety and security. Through these writings and mini visual explorations, they had to do a lot of thinking surrounding these topics and they made their own color ray and silhouette to represent them and their story. They completed the mural by painting their color ray and placing their own reflective laser cut mirrored acrylic.
There were some really powerful moments during the reflection portion of the piece when we all looked and reflected on the completed works. We asked the students to go in turn and say why they choose the symbol and color that they did. All the stories ended up being extremely personal and powerful, some with laughs, some gave me chills, some were brutally honest and revealing and quite a few made me tear up and cry. When we asked if their thoughts on this subject had changed after listening to their peer's stories, one person said that they "felt more connected to my peers now than I have over these last two semesters together."
Another said that hearing the stories made her realize that there were similar stories from people who came from Europe and other places and that she felt more connected and less alone.
By using the integrative strategies to incorporate world events, writing, literacy, geography to the project, it created a deeper sense of learning and knowledge recall. For this particular project, there was a lot of self reflection on behalf of the students. Writing and literacy took a predominant role to help them talk about their experiences and personal stories.
During the reflection portion of the project, all the work we put into planning and teaching the lesson became profound.
I wasn't sure when or if it would lead to the understanding that we had planned, but it did. It was not only a deep and meaningful experience for our peer students, but also was an exploration that had changed me. This was a much larger project with direct subject explorations than I had ever done before. Suddenly, I could see how this could relate to a unit of lessons and how integrating other subjects and learning into this exploration opened up a world of possibilities and future lessons. Now for this current week, we are exploring food insecurity with our second peer teaching group. I can see how these social justice issues could be related and are connected.
For my reflective piece on this project, I've chosen to make a painting exploration about integrative strategies and teaching using a still life of the tomato and vanilla plants. At first glance, this may seem like a simple still life, but I've chosen these fruits that came from and originated from the Americas. I have been thinking about the movement, migration and immigration of people and how that has changed cultures and their foods for generations. How the identity of the tomato might seem so very Italian, but the tomato wasn't introduced to Europe until the 1500's. Also- as a side note, I choose a banana as a symbol of Guatemala for our project but learned that the banana originated in South East Asia. I find this movement of food and their inherent identities to be a good segway for these social justice issues of immigration and food security. All of this exploration as a teacher and as a student has lead me to a deeper excitement for teaching. I feel as though this learning is a path we are all on together (teachers too!) I want the painting of the tomatoes and vanilla to remind me and symbolise this moment in my learning to be a teacher, these profound moments of connection and how lessons become units of learning.
I am more motivated than before to continue this kind of integrated learning and explorations into topics of high potential energy. Integrating technology into our project in a new and meaningful way that really enhanced our topic felt like one of our peer teaching group's huge successes. The integration of the technology wasn't just a side note or secondary, but became a real utilizable tool to complete this project. Using the laser cutting tool also allowed many of our students to consider future applications. Our project lead to deeper understandings of ourselves, our peers and that of others. I truly feel that personal stories and these testimonies can change our understanding of the world and drive us to relate and understand our fellow humans, wherever their stories may come from. This leads to knowledge and change.
Process shots of the reflective art piece and also of the peer teaching project:
