At least once a quarter, my colleagues and I create a big project for our students. We hope that they will connect what they learn in the classroom with the wider experiences they have in the community.
Our students are adult refugees and immigrants who struggle with print literacy. Many of them are greatconversationalists but freeze once pen and paper are in front of them. Our goal with this project was to get them writing. We asked students to write about the things that interest them the most—family, friends, children and community.
We got a good deal on some recyclable cameras from a big-box store and gave each student a camera with some instructions. They were to take the cameras home and take photos to answer the question, “What is my community?” They had a week to answer the question and turn in their cameras.
We had the cameras developed. The photos were marvelous—children beamed, birds flew, trees waved, classmates hid and buses chugged by. The students treasured their little envelopes of photos, going through them over and over again.
The next instructions were simple: Choose your 10 favorite photos and write a paragraph about each photo. The students, who generally find any kind of distraction to avoid writing, now jumped in heartily.
My colleague and I whispered to each other in the hallway.
“Are your students totally silent?”
“Yeah, they are!”
One student built a story out of a series of photos of his family and himself in a garden. The apartment building where he lives is in a part of the city where rents are low and also where a lot of recent refugees and immigrants live. In the photos, his 3-year-old daughter pulled at sweet corn and his 8-year-old picked eggplants.
One photo showed his wife pouring coffee at a traditional table filled with vegetable dishes from the garden. “Our Ramadan traditional time,” the man told me as he pointed to the picture.
Another student dedicated most of his pictures to his 7-year-old daughter. “I love her very much,” he told me, tears filling his eyes. “Her mother and me, we fight. She doesn’t want me anymore, so she moved out. I want to see my daughter more than I do.” He pasted his photos into a book and decorated the margins with flowers, glitter glue and the flag of his country.
One of my Nepali students filled her book with photos of her family enjoying nature. Under a photo of her family at a park, she wrote, “The trees make oxygen for all living things to breathe. I love it!”
This project outlined the importance of making class assignments relevant to the students’ lives. When they were able to make a personal connection to the subject matter, they were able to produce a lot more language. They also learned a lot about their classmates in the process.
Anfinson is an ELL civics teacher in Minnesota.
Links:
[1] http://www.tolerance.org/author/brenda-anfinson