An Ecology of Me: Exploring Personal Civic History, a 7th Grade Workshop Inspired by @sonianieto

We've had a few snow days in Connecticut and, as a result, several projects with a K-8 school have been canceled. This, of course, arrived with a new Crandall challenge: How does one create a workshop with 25 7th graders from a social studies class studying the Civil War and 25 7th graders studying ecosystems in a science class? How does an instructor of an undergraduate course on teaching writing model how to 'think outside the box' while celebrating the cultural diversity of a K-8 school? How does one hit  analysis and interpretation as presented by Kelly Gallagher in Write Like This?

One breathes in. One breathes out. One realizes that the exceptional Dr. Sonia Nieto is guest speaking at Fairfield University later that night.

I simply asked, what would Sonia do? Author of What Keeps Teachers Going, Finding Joy in Teaching Students of Diverse Backgrounds, Why We Teach, Affirming Diversity, Language, Culture and Teaching, The Light In Their Eyes, and Puerto Rican Students in U.S. Schools, Nieto has always reminded me to put students first.

The skinny: 50 students and 16 undergraduates + two content-area teachers.

The workshop? An Ecology of Me: Exploring Personal Civic History, where young people charted out the multiple communities that make their voices possible. Here's how it went down.

Step One: Two undergraduates were charged with an opening activity to kick things off. They knew analysis and interpretation was the goal and chose to print out several riddles and comic strips for the young people (and my students) to think about and scrutinize over. Both were hard as tables discussed their solutions to riddles and cartoons, but it was a great ice-breaker.

Step Two: Define Ecosystems, Civics, Analyzation, and Interpretation.

Step Three: Do a community building activity where tables of strangers learn more about each other.

Step Four: Ask 4 volunteers to share what life is like in 2017 for 7th graders. They name music, games, families, school, world events as items on their mind (Note: Predict this).

Step Five: Present a chart listing music, games, families, school, and world events with the dates of 1865 (a year of the Civil War) and 1985 (the year I was in 7th grade). Then, in each category, demonstrate what life was like (for me, music in 1985 was Aha's Take On Me, which all the students sang along to). As one goes through the chart, they see that life ins 1865 was different, but also some of it was the same (by the way, they are not amused or entertained by life in 1865, but they love their life right now). On their chart, offer them 2018 so they can list details about music, games, family life, world events important to them.

Step Six: Discuss the Civil War and what the conflict was about. Return to the definition of civility.

Step Seven: Show an ecosystem and have kids discuss how all the parts create stasis and equilibrium.

Step Eight: Show a painting of the Civil War and ask, "What was the disruption of the U.S. ecosystem in this point of history? Why was equilibrium disrupted?"

Step Nine: Read a Walt Whitman poem Beat! Beat! Drums! Discuss the context for the poem. Ask for an undergraduate and a 7th grader to perform the words as they are read.

Step Ten: Ask two 7th graders to read Kwame Alexander's Seventy-Six Dollars and Forty-Nine Cents, a poem from Ellen Oh's Flying Lessons and Other Stories (from the #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement). Discuss the context of the science classroom and how Alexander creates a story of a young man interrupting the ecosystem by tricking his teacher.

Step Eleven: Model how ecosystems (communities) make up your life: family, education, cities lived in, influences.

Step Eight: Hand out a blank chart for kids to list the communities that make them who they are.

Step Nine: Initiate a conversation about how communities sometimes conflict with one another.

Step Ten: Model paragraphs about each community that you've written. Address how each community is an ecosystem that makes you who you are. Make connections that these modern ecosystems are the result of historical ecosystems (including the civil war and the U.S. mission to try to reach its true democracy).

Step Eleven: Allow kids to write and see what they come up with.

Step Twelve: Bring a few kids up front and draw on what they wrote to model how they might develop this. Share Share Share. Collect these drafts so they can be continued at school.

Step Thirteen: Conduct a human lap-sit challenge. Make a point about community.

Step Fourteen: Challenge the kids and teachers to write essays on the Ecology of Me: Exploring Civic History where they develop knowledge about the communities that make them who they are and they analyze and interpret the histories behind them.

Step Fifteen: Feed them in a college campus cafeteria.

Then smile! 

It worked. The teachers left with 100% success of students brainstorming what they might write next, finding a way for 7th grade history and science collaborating with one another (I bet, too, the ELA teacher might be delighted).

Later that night, kids depart for their homes, but you stay and have the fortune of hearing the wisdom of scholar Sonia Nieto speak about the importance of multiculturalism and student-centered pedagogy. Then you get to go to dinner with her. You pinch yourself.

Then, before bed, you simply thank the Great Whatever (yes, the band in Kwame Alexander and Mary Rand Hess's Solo) and you fall asleep thinking, "Sometimes, magic exists."

Phew.