My students need a digital audio recorder with mics and cords to complete an innovative oral history project with area veterans on world events to be edited for radio.
My students are adventurous, yet stagnant. They are trapped inside the mindset of 21st Century adolescents, with a disconnect to global historical events. This project has the potential to change their lives by connecting them with community elders and hear them share their stories.
I am blessed to share my life with 64 of the most curious, quirky, and wonderful seventh graders that you'll ever meet.
Demographically, they are primarily African-American and white, with very wide socio-economic backgrounds. Such diversity brings rich conversation into my classroom on a daily basis, especially when teaching social studies. They all learn differently, they all have their strengths that we celebrate and they have things that we help them with. I see my role in their lives as building relationships with them, and facilitating their learning.
Our school is a place where we all continue to grow, to evolve, to become better educators and people. Our students help us learn every day, as do our colleagues.
My students are beautiful. They are not perfect. They are struggling to find their way and understand our world and how they can find and follow their passions. They are the reason I teach.
My Project
My students in the past have struggled to connect with historical events that have happened in the world before they were born. Without a personal connection, students sometimes fail to understand how these events have shaped our world today. Our school also has little interaction with our community through our curriculum. This oral history project will take students into their community to interview elders, many of them veterans, about significant world events they have witnessed.
The digital recording device, the microphones, the mic cords, and the SD card will allow students to travel to our local veterans hospital and veterans housing and record interviews with them about their experiences in different global events. Students will then edit the interviews, and our local public radio station will be able to air them based on the quality of the equipment and recording. Then the stories will be shared with the broader community.
This project will change many lives.
It is the first of it's kind in our district, and has the potential to inspire other teachers to engage in oral histories. It will embrace multi-generational learning, as our youth interact with our elders, and it will preserve the legacy of these men and women in our community who have witnessed large world events such as WWI, WWII, The Cold War, and many others. Most importantly, it will give students a personal connection to their history.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Post and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.