Here you will find sosme details about the project and compare the plains and the implementation. The information below is at our blogs(Lucas and Marly), is in the Lesson Plan and some experiences that we had in this project.
In Clarke Middle School, we will be working with 7th grade students in regular 70-minute classes at Clarke Middle School. In each group we have an average of 25 students between 13 and 15 years old. The majority is Afro-Americans(50%), with Caucasian second group (35%) and finally Hispanics figuring the minority (15%).
During classes, students with low level of reading and writing skills were observed (40%). Most of these students have been passed through the grades without accomplishing the respective requirements of reading, writing, and simple mathematical operations.
Another important observation is that even the students with behavior problems or learning difficulties get involved when they are engaged in activities related to technologies such as microscope observation, or computer activities, and activities out of the classroom.
In the very first conversation (at our very first visit to Clarke Middle School) we had with Mr. Scott, he mentioned the possibility of the project be about bugs, which was the subject of the ELT (Extended Learning Time) class. But none of us considered this purpose very feasible, because we would have a few time for preparing ourselves, for preparing the content, for elaborating the lesson plan, to summarize, for preparing every single thing and everything! After a few days, we talked to him again about the possibilities of working with his students. He let us know that we could choose between Heredity and Natural Selection/Evolution themes (these were the themes standardized by Georgia Standards for Seventh Grade to be covered in the Second Quarter). Mr. Scott suggested we could work on Amazonia subject, its diversity of life, etc. Marly thought this a good idea right from the start. Later, Lucas came up with the idea of approaching Heredity subject. Consequently, the two of us had to design different project sketch (see the Appendix in order to take a look on the Amazon project draft insert a link to it here).
Link's content
Amazon: a multicultural approach
Problem and Schedule draft- study of Amazonia and subjects related, such as: South America/Amazon Basin (the 9 South American countries which possess some Amazon Basin part in its territory), the concepts biome, ecosystem, and the ecosystems existing in Amazonia, and the biodiversity. If there will be available time, we could discuss and make activities about some social aspects, such as: peopling/ illegal occupation, Sustainable Development, economical extraction, and deforestation. Concerning to the schedule, we didn't decide it yet, 'cause Mr. Scott said we could develop the project at the his class' time (70 minutes) or in the ELT classes (30 minutes), without any inconvenience to him. We should make a definitive decision during this week.
Curriculum- According the teacher's suggestion, this subject has to do with one of the areas he will work on this second quarter, which is " Natural Selection/ Evolution".
Social responsibility/Multiculturalism: this is a good subject to be worked in, since Amazonia possess several natural resources for research in a number of areas, as well as her great quantity of water, a natural resource threaten in a straightforward way next decades.
As soon as we had designed our projects' draft and posted it on our blogs, we let Mr. Scott know. Then he went over the both of two purposes. At the following meeting we had with Mr. Scott, he demonstrated himself very interested in Heredity’s purpose, but he would like to insert Biodiversity in the Heredity subject, or cover it aside. He affirmed his interest in has the project realized on all seventh grade Life Science groups. Lucas asked how do the students show a better performance, and he told us that they are very good at computer activities (in the lab and in the classroom at laptops). He lent us two textbooks, about Heredity and Environmental Science. After the meeting, Lucas had been talking to the Geography teacher, in order to figure it out how did he approach concepts like country and culture. The teacher explained us rapidly and lent him a textbook containing a few content about these themes.
As We have stated at the previous session in our model to be followed in this project, we started realizing a data collection. With a small questionaire we've got the student's full name, adress and their parents' name (See the full questionnaire in the appendix session). These informaion were useful to us to figure out their main characteristics, a question about their ethnicity question helped us as well to realize how diversified the classroom was, without using stereotypes based on their characteristics such as skin color or hair shape.
In order to "finalize" this step, We watched a short movie about science, trying to help them think more about the importance of observate things around you and make science with this. It was a good activity; we used the Science Patterns form (Appendix), to make them think and write about that, letting us know about what they think and what they already know about that. The quotations at the word "finalize", in the beginning of this paragraph, means that the "data collection" occurs through the whole project, and this initial information is util to us to begin our actual work.
In this section we'd like to share with you how important the last step was. After looking over all that we've done so far, We perceived how rich informations we have in our hands. With their data we could see that activities concerning about family's history would be hardly implemented, since most of the kids don't live and some don't know one of the parents, or are addopted. Activities that were potentially rich as genealogival tree and family portrait, lost their meaning though.
We also, in this step, made the first questions about what they think about the North america ancestrals, what they know about the colonization process, aways showing them how it happened in Brazil and the rest of south america, this last one superficially explored. We've got good discussion talking about the concept of African American, everybody's common ancester, and as a more modern discuccion we talked about one kid, with his permission, who is from South Africa. This guys is white and has a blonde hair, howerver he is African american, they started to realize about the wrong concepts about races, and how people use it in wrong ways.
Finally, in this section we could see that students don't like to talk about themselves or their families, they are ashamed of show their personal things, therefore we needed to make a more general approach, and let them take their time to do it by themselves.
Here we are, in the 3rd step of our project and heading to the end. Here the students improved their ideas and their knowledge talking about them. This step was developed in the last meeting, when we had the final discussion about "What makes you you? ". After we asked this, opinions popped out around the class saying this and that, saying that the Environment plays a more important role in what they are that the Genes do. Others, two students, kept saying that it is the DNA the most important factor.
They mentioned Music, Language, Technology, Life styles as important factors of change and beeing changed by the society, recognizing themselves as members of a bigger community: The World.
Here we are going to do a Video Conference between Brazilians and Americans Students involved in this project. This final step tends to be a very important thing to the enclousure of the project. While the students exchange ideas they can stress what they've learned and change some of their remaining undesired stereotypes about other cultures or even about their culture. We hope this section will give us the desired outcome to close our participation here.
Going beyond:
First week
At the first meeting of our project we presented a video named “What is Pattern” in which was discussed the procedures that scientists have to conduct by “making Science.” Before this exposition, the students were provided a handout, in which they had to answer the initial questions based on their predictions considering what the video will be about. Afterward, the students were asked to complete the handout’s portion about the scientific process and scientific procedures.
On Wednesday we presented a Power Point presentation about how will be conducted our project: the objectives, the main activities and the calendar. A student let us know she couldn’t understand what miscegenation stood for, and then Mr. Scott explained it briefly. We mentioned that we would try to hold a videoconference between the Clarke Middle's students and Brazilian of their similar age and grade about the subjects approached during the project. Some students thought the idea very good and demonstrated interest on taking part on it and/or in having more information about it.
Second week
On the Monday 06 we started the Trait tree activity. Lucas explained them what they were supposed to do and gave them a leaflike piece of paper containing three traits: Skin Color, Eyes Color and Hair Color, and its respective options. This activity took a lot of time, due to they weren’t collaborative in this day. Unfortunately, we didn’t get this activity done on Monday.
On Wednesday we conducted the completion of Monday’s activity. Lucas displayed on the Smart board the trait tree and requested the leaders to put on any tree’s branch the leaflike pieces of paper from their groups.
On Friday we presented a Power Point presentation about the Brazilian miscegenation process, including a number of aspects, such as
- The Indigenous and African slaveries
- The role of Portuguese/European colonizer, the African slave and of the native indigenous in the Brazilian identity’s formation
- Immigration
- Some excerpts of Darcy Ribeiro’s book concerning to the role of African people in the Brazilian culture and economics, and about the variety of Brazilian phenotypes.
Following the presentation, Lucas made any further comments about Brazil’s discovery and capoeira, mainly. He downloaded a Capoeira video and the students viewed it. I notice that it catch their attention, even the attention of that ones who aren’t African-American. I got especially delighted because of the sentences of J.(one of the African-American students): “It’s from me, it’s from my people!” Man, I felt that we got them involved and recognized on this activity proposed. It was really an amazing feeling. In spite of this, Lucas thought that it wasn’t so good, because it demonstrates that Justin identified himself with the guys shown due to the color’s skin only. So he didn’t realize the meaning of culture in the way we intended him (the students, as a whole) understand it. I don’t know about it… I know that it pleased me very much anyway, though.
Third week
The seventh meeting task was the exhibition of a video named “Brazil revealed”, presenting some Brazilian cities, such as small and unknown ones (for instance, Abaetetuba) as well as huge ones (to illustrate, Sao Paulo). The video had as subject other general themes for example: religion, music, dance, economical aspects, such as producao agropecuaria and helicopteros fleet utilized by businessmen in Sao Paulo city, etc. Afterward, we assigned the students compose a text about the city where they live (Athens). The text was supposed to has at least one paragraph for each of the aspects mentioned earlier in the video about Brazil (with reference to Athens). The due date for the text submission was the following meeting. Mr. Scott assumed this activity as homework too.
In the following meeting Marly (Lucas was not able to be present, because he got sick) tried to conduct a discussion about the students' texts, stimulating them talk aloud the ideas they put on their texts. Unfortunately and for Marly's disappointment, only 3 students submmited the assignment. As a result, a few students engaged themselves in the discussion and always the same students talked about different themes. So, the discussion was fairly poor. This was an activity that we think could have been better conducted.
On ninth and last meeting, the first activity was a Power Point presentation about the data of a scientific research named "The Ancestry of Brazilian mtDNA Lineages." The research had as goal find out the Brazilian ancestry traits in several continents, and it confirms biologically what the studies of Brazilian writers, specifically Gilberto Freyre, Sergio Buarque de Holanda, and Darcy Ribeiro affirms: the Brazilian people is the result of crossing among Indigenous people, African people, and European people. Also, we presented a few content about other South American countries. We did it because the research data mentioned that considerable part of the Brazilian genetic heritance is present in other South American populations either. Next, we retrieved the discussion conducted at the eighth meeting about the texts' content (we received more texts on Friday, wow!!!!!), for the purpose of answering the question: what is most influential in my personality: my genotype, my phenotype, both of two, or is it the culture I'm inserted in? The teacher, Mr. Scott, wrote a question very pertinent on the whiteboard: “What makes you you?” I thought it was pretty clever!!! We requested them write down on the whiteboard their answers. J. wrote down "- Environment, D wrote down “- My style”, I though it all very interesting, very neat!