My students need 120 copies of Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone for their culminating 9th grade project.
$1,518 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
What responsibility do we have to act as (global) citizens? This is the question our students will be asking themselves as they read Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone in preparation for their culminating 9th grade project.
My students attend an urban dependent charter school in California.
Over 60% of our students receive free and reduced lunch. We have a large population of English language learners. Over 5% of our students receive special education services. Many students attend our school because they are seeking a smaller high school experience where they won't get lost in the shuffle. They seek a small, safe, positive culture. Student voice is important and encouraged; students are always a part of the decision making process. They take great ownership in the school, and are often describing it as their second "home" or "family."
My Project
Our guiding question this semester was, "What responsibility do we have to act as (global) citizens?" With Fahrenheit 451, we looked at our personal responsibility to examine how media controls us. With Of Mice and Men, we looked at our responsibility to act when issues are "swept under the rug," as Steinbeck did by writing the novel. With Romeo and Juliet, we looked our responsibility as citizens to examine an issue in our community (gang violence) and act.
For their final project, we would like our 9th graders to examine the question, "What responsibility do we have to act as (global) citizens?" They will read Ishmael Beah's memoir A Long Way Gone, where he details his experiences as a child solider in Sierra Leone. Using this novel and the others from this semester as evidence, our students will be writing a paper that defends their learning for the semester and answers our guiding question.
So often, we are only concerned with ourselves.
Our goal as teachers is to create active and engaged global citizens. We want our students to take their experiences from class and think about their responsibilities beyond what they see. We find that students are able to write, discuss, and think about these current global issues when they've read, and that novels and personal accounts open that discussion in ways that textbooks cannot.
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