My students need 3 video cameras to complete their service learning projects, which require them to turn their social justice research papers into digital stories.
This project is part of the Black History Month celebration because it supports a Black teacher or a school where the majority of the students are Black.
My Students
Our city- one of promise and hope, is one also plagued by a deteriorating educational system, a crumbling economy, & abandoned neighborhoods. Last year, my students decided to raise their voices in the conversation concerning their city’s plight, and began to capture its story through their eyes.
My students, high school seniors within an urban setting, have dreams of going to college, yet hold fast to their neighborhoods, their roots, their city.
They love it. They long for it to better. Yet ultimately, once most people leave our city, they never come back. My students wish desperately to begin posing questions of what they see around them, and to begin developing answers, believing in their power as agents of change within a context that all but silences them. They have risen.
Over the past 6 months, students have been participating in initiatives to get them thinking about what particular issue they wish to research and address;some are disturbed about the high dropout rate amongst males within our city, while others are concerned about the rate of obesity amongst their loved ones. There are many issues they wish to address, and hope- in addition to their research and their planning, they will have resources to share what they find with others. Including you.
My Project
Right now, I have 1 video camera, 1 digital camera, and 70 students who all wish to produce projects, six months from now, that reveal the conclusions of their youth-driven, service-learning based research. First, students will be committed to ten weeks of research. In the midst of this, they will be participating in an 11 week internship that compliments their research; for instance, one student plans on researching food access issues, and may participate in an urban farming collective, collecting data from local farmers and activists & documenting the impact that people like these have on their surrounding neighborhood community. Cameras would allow us, then, to share what we find with others, giving us an authentic audience to share our research with. Additionally, it gives us the ability to share our process of such an authentic process with others & “speak back” to those issues that plague us, giving us a voice in the conversation concerning the future of our city.
You are making a difference by planting a seed into fertile, curious, thirsty ground.
My students have important stories to tell, and simply need a more effective means to share them. Your donation will help us to not only feel and see the power of our words and ideas , but also to share with others how they might re-imagine what “research writing and projects” in the classroom might really look like. Your donation will be reaching into a community that desperately needs to hear its youth.
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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. Filipiak and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.