I want our students to understand how their lives are different from those of children from different times and places. Studying diversity of experience and worldview in Social Studies and other classes is good, but it’s very hard for students to understand conditions so foreign to them.
There is no typical student at our school; we have loud kids and quiet ones, artsy kids and sporty ones, studious kids and spacey ones.
I think that the common denominator in our students is that they’re happy kids who enjoy coming to school every day. Our school focuses on teaching the whole child, including some parts that most schools gloss over. We have hall breaks where kids can chat (or scream) to vent energy between classes, a school show where every student performs, and an advisory system that lets kids discuss their problems in a small, close-knit group.
Most classes are mixed-grade, so it’s not uncommon to see an 8th grader working in the same Social Studies group as a 5th grader half their size. This gives the older kids a lot of responsibility, the younger kids a lot of mentors, and everyone a strong sense of community.
My Project
In our case, the materials would be funding for a school trip to see He Named Me Malala. We would discuss the backdrop to Malala’s story before the trip, using the small-group setting of advisory. We’d ask what students already know about Pakistan, fill them in on the recent history of radical Islam in that part of the world, discuss how Malala’s life is similar to and different from theirs, and what they’d do in her situation. Then, after the screening, we’d ask students to reflect on what they saw—how they felt, what they learned, if their opinions changed. I think that many classes from Social Studies to Literature would be able to connect and incorporate Malala’s story into their curriculum.
This project will make a difference because Malala’s story is so powerful, especially for young students.
School is something that many students take for granted, but her story shows how hard some kids have to fight to go to school at all. This trip would be an invaluable opportunity to expose our whole school to a world that they wouldn’t otherwise see or understand, and that it would add a dimension of empathy and global context to our students’ experience.
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