Section Three: Finding Our Place in the World The Family History Project I notice that we all come

from different places in the worldJessica At the end of my first year of my masters courses at High Tech High Graduate School I participated in something called a Presentation of Learning (POL). At this meeting, I presented my thoughts on what I would complete my action research on for my thesis the following year. As I presented my research question and highlighted the key outcomes I wanted for my students it was suggested that one way I could begin my research on global citizenship was to have my students think about the world beyond their local community by completing a family history project. I decided to embrace this suggestion because it hit on the global characteristic we are aware of the world and our role in it perfectly. It also tied in to the characteristic we understand that people around the world have different cultures and react to things differently. As Carlsson-Paige stated, I needed to recognize the power of the local in building a global perspective. When students learn to respect and befriend classmates from different backgrounds and cultures, they are learning a significant concept for global citizenship. (2005, p. 123). I began by having the parents help students complete several different activities. These activities included connecting with grandparents, doing a family tree, collecting family artifacts and heirlooms, and interviewing family members (Appendix B), and then creating a collage from copies of the family photographs. One of the best activities for the students was to work through a family tree. I created a document that had boxes to input each generation of a students family in. At the top was the student and at the bottom, if they had the information, they could input their great-great grandparents. Many students filled in the boxes as far back as their great grandparents. These family trees helped all of us, including the students; learn several things about each other. The main thing learned was where we all came from and how long ago we came to San Diego. Out of the 16 students that completed the family tree, six either didnt have enough information to track beyond the United States or had their great-great grandparents immigrate from another country to the United States. Three had great grandparents emigrate to the U.S. from another country and three had grandparents emigrate from a different country. Three had parents who emigrated and one emigrated here with her family when she was younger. Out of all 16 students 12 had parents who immigrated to California from another state. This allowed the students to understand that we all come from different places in the world. The students were also asked to collect artifacts or heirlooms of their family and its history. I connected with parents and asked them to help the students collaborate with their relatives to find artifacts to bring in to share with the class at the end of the unit. For the most part, parents were very excited to share in the project with their students. Many went to their grandparents and looked through their family items. The oldest item brought in was an old arithmetic book from the early 1900s. The students who didnt have access to items older than their parents artifacts were asked to go through their parents things and pull out the special artifacts to share.

One thing I did not anticipate was hesitation from some of the parents in completing this task. What I realized is that some families might be estranged and may not want to connect with or know how to connect with their extended family. I had two families who were wary of completing this activity. As I discussed their concerns with them, I realized I had to modify my guidelines to make this activity a meaningful, quality experience for each of my students and their families. This is why I ended up making the collection process include parent items as well. I reassured all parents that whatever they could do with this project would be great. Along with the artifacts, the students were asked to collect photographs of their ancestors and current family members. They brought in so many wonderful photos. I especially loved the old black and white ones. One student brought in so many photos we couldnt get through them all in the time we had. One of the best parts of the photo sharing was that they showed the culture of the family members that had come from different countries. Things like a fishing boat and a great grandfather from Canada let us get a glimpse into the culture of one family while pictures of a wagon with family members dresses in the typical early 1900s dress gave us a glimpse into the culture of that time period in American history. The family stories that the students shared helped to solidify these images for us. When it was time to present everything that we found I, first, presented my own researched family artifacts and pictures and told the story of my family members that had emigrated from Pennsylvania to Bonita, California. I told of how my great grandmother crossed the United States in a covered wagon with her family. She had twin brothers named Mike and Ike (true story) that traveled as well. As they traveled across Texas there was a huge storm and the river they were traveling near flooded and carried Ike away and he died. They continued to travel west until they reached Bonita, California. I then told them why they decided to settle in Bonita. Bonita was close to the border of Mexico and because my great grandmothers mother was Native American the family encountered prejudice in other parts of the United States because she was different than the other settlers. The family did not encounter this in Bonita because the color of her skin was similar to that of the Mexicans in the area. The students had several questions about this and we began to discuss another aspect of global citizenship, which was Everyone else is equal to me but different from me. This was an introduction discussion that would lead into other discussions throughout my research. We discussed how some people are not kind to those who are different than them. This theme was a great starting point in learning the importance of understanding that people around the world have different cultures and react to things differently. I then asked students to share their own family stories. Below are a few of the stories that students shared. This was such a great activity because it allowed us to get a glimpse into the past through each others family history. Student Family Stories Once when people had to hunt for food my grandpas brother could never catch anything. But my grandpa caught a lot of things. So one day my uncle went hunting all alone and found a dead

raccoon on the ground and decided to bring it home and say he caught it. So when he went home he got so excited he pulled the trigger and shot a hole right through the freezer. Larry (3rd grade) My great grandpa owned his own street and he got to shake hands with the president of Mexico. It is really cool that my grandpa great owned his own street and I wish that I can make my own street called Rady Road and that would be really cool that I owned my own street in California. Robert (2nd grade) I have a great grandmother. She is almost 100 years old. I dont know about her a lot because she lives in a very different place than America. She lives in Israel. And this fact about her which I think would be found fascinating she still works in a busy restaurant and dances. Kacey (3rd grade) My grandpa was in world war 2! He was stationed in Germany when he met my grandma. They werent allowed to be seen together so they went to a carnival. When he went back to American he proposed to her in a note. Leo (3rd grade) My great great great grandfather and so on and so on. Well, first of all his name was Einice Butrick. In the 1800s when Native Americans were still around they would the people would kill and shoot the animals in the time range that they were in and as for the skins they would use the fur to make coats and belts and things like that. Well one night when my grandfather was asleep the Indians stole the furs from the back of the wagon! But my grandfather heard them. He took off his night shirt and put on his clothes and went out to get the furs back. When he came back he had all the furs but two! About a hundred years later a farmer was digging and found bones of Indians! The End?!?! Sandy (3rd grade) Then, they presented their found artifacts and family trees to the class. As each student presented we examined their oldest family members birthplaces on the global bulletin board. I encouraged students to ask each presenter questions about what they shared. This was a valuable learning experience that showed that we all come from somewhere else in the world. It was also a wonderful project for parents and their students to work together and learn about their family histories. We had students who had ancestors that emigrated from Argentina, Italy, Spain, the Philippines, China, and many other places.

Creating Visual Connections Our next step was to create collages with copies of the old family photos the students shared. Once we created the collages we attached them to string. One end of the string was stapled to a place that one of their ancestors emigrated from in the world and the other end of the string with the collage on it was stapled to the outskirts of the bulletin board.

When we completed our collages I gave a response and reflection journal prompt, Observe the Ancestor Collages: What do you notice about where we all come from in the world? There was one huge theme that was prevalent in all student responses. That was the awareness that we all come from different places. Nine students actually used the phrase We all come from different places. In all, 12 out of 16 stated in some way that we come from different places in the world. I notice that we all live in different places but some more live in Europe. One lives in Israel. One lives in Texas. Kacey (3rd grade) I noticed that nobody comes from the same place. Like, nobody can trace themselves to the West Indies. Only Sally can trace herself to the West Indies. Only me and my sister can trace our family back to the same place and that is because we are sisters. Because nobody comes from the same place we are all different in many ways. If we were all the same then there would be nothing new and exciting. There are lots of people in the world and everyone is different in their own way. Elly (3rd grade)

I notice that all our ancestors come from different places. Like some ancestors come from across the oceans, and some peoples ancestors come from the U.S. Also, I notice that some peoples parents come from different countries. And even some people were born in different countries. Alison (3rd grade) I notice that when I was a baby I was born in Texas and when I was in the doctor and my mom got the baby it was a different baby. My mom said this is not my baby to the doctor. Then my mom have me. John (2nd grade) We were all born in different places. Our families live in different places. All of our grandparents and great grandparents lived in different places. Mary (2nd grade) It is clear from the quotes above that the students learned that we all come from different places. We also learned a great deal about our own place in the world by learning about our relatives. This was the beginning point for two of our global citizenship characteristics; We are aware of the world and our role in it and We understand that people around the world have different cultures and react to things differently. We would continue to build upon these statements. Something Unexpected As stated earlier, I had my bulletin board up in my classroom from the beginning of the school year on. It had a map of the California that leads into a map of the United States that leads into a map of the world. It had the collages that each of the students and myself made for their ancestor projects (Each one connected by yarn to the place on the map where an ancestor immigrated from). Our site is small (total number of students is approximately 150) with only about 75 students from kindergarten to twelfth grade coming onsite 2 days a week and about 40 students coming on another day a week. We had students and parents coming in and out daily for monthly meetings. My classroom was one of the first classrooms in the building so parents and students passed my room after they entered the building. An interesting thing happened as the weeks passed. As students, teachers, and parents walked by, they often came in to look at the maps. They discussed the collages or pointed to different places that they had been or wanted to go or would say that they knew someone who was from some place, etc. This was so fun to observe. My classroom was definitely an open door classroom and

I never had the door shut when I was not teaching. I think this was important because it related directly with being aware of the world. Having students know my classroom was available to them at anytime even during a non class day allowed them to take ownership of it and the maps. By having their collages on it they were a piece of it and a piece of the world. This led back to being aware of the world and our role in it. Wild Spaces in our Backyard The community is the world in miniature Makiguchi In simple terms, Dewey believed that students need to have real world experiences attached to learning. To that end, I was deliberate about the types of learning experiences I planned for my students in relation to becoming global citizens and learning about water and the world around us. From the first week of school, we discussed the connections that we all have to others in our class, our school, our community, and to other countries. We did this in several ways. First, we connected to our local wild space where we ate lunch. As Noddings stated in Educating Students for Global Awareness, students must learn to care for our own local places, thus learning that commitment to the environment requires work, not just talk. (2005, p. 62). Our school is in a business complex. We are surrounded by offices and next to a road with a local high school on one side and a creek with a walking space, benches and landscaping on the other side. This area is filled with trees, walkways, a creek, bushes, and green inviting landscaping. It has a wilderness feel in the city. This is our wild space. The students have quite appropriately dubbed it fairyland and some of my students have begun to imagine that it is Teribithia (from the popular young readers book Bridge to Teribithia) when playing in it. This was the perfect location to connect my students with the environment. This space had saved our students and teachers from feeling cooped up in a classroom for the whole class day. As we allowed our students to go and frolic in this space during snack and lunch I began to witness something that disturbed me. The students had no care for the landscaping they were trampling through. Often times they would be plowing over bushes and leaving trash on the ground. I realized this was a perfect learning opportunity for all of us on taking care of our environment around us. I knew that if I started with this local site I would be able to connect it to the broader world later on. As Carlsson-Paige states, When students learn to study and care for their own backyards and neighborhoods, they are preparing to study global ecology (2005, p. 123). I began by discussing with student the importance of keeping the plants intact and not running through areas that are meant to be preserved. What if we trampled through all of this area and all the plants and shrubs died? How would it look? We discussed how this was not only our space. Others enjoyed coming to this area and eating lunch or taking walks also. Even though trash may not be ours we still want to take part in making our environment clean and usable for everyone. Will people want to come down here if there is trash everywhere? No! yelled the students. What about animals? What will happen to animals if they accidentally eat our trash? We discussed many of these questions. They will get sick one student said. Another said that the

animals would die. We discussed that if we dont take care of it we wont have a space to play in or eat in at all. The students understood this and were very enthusiastic to clean up the trash. Every day after our time in our wild space the students would check to make sure it was cleaner than we found it. We also were constantly reminded not to run over bushes and to be respectful of the area. I elaborated on the discussion to include altering the environment. I explained how the area we play in does not look the way it does naturally. People came in and actually created the space that we get to play in. Because of this, it was very important to make sure that the elements of the space are left alone as much as possible. We discussed how we should not move the rocks on the hillside because they help other elements of the hill stay in place. After several of these conversations at the beginning of the year, I took my students on a nature walk with clipboards, paper, and pencils. I had all of them find a comfortable place to sit on the ground or on the edge of the walk way. The first activity I had them do was to close their eyes and listen to the sounds around them. What did they hear? After about two minutes I then had them open there eyes and sketch the sounds they heard. Many had the overlapping theme of city vs. nature in their drawings. There were birds chirping but also during their listening time there was an airplane that had flown overhead. Both of these visuals were represented in the sketches they made. We discussed the sounds they heard. Next, I had two hula hoops and I put them in two separate areas of the creek and had them sketch everything they observed in the hula hoop. I made sure that they knew to sketch even the trash, insects, rocks, and so on. I heard many wonderful observations: It looks slimy! or Look at that bug! or There is trash in our circle. After these activities, we discussed how even though we are in the city there is still nature all around us and we need to make sure to respect that nature so we dont lose it. We would revisit this wild space each class day and bring the space into the classroom as much as we could. For

example, we would discuss our environment and the fact that the way we treat our local space will help us to understand how we treat other spaces as we grow older. We would also bring it in when observing water samples from local areas (we gathered a water sample from the creek in our wild space). My hope was that if we discussed caring for the environment enough and worked through trash pick up and other activities to bring love of this space to our students, that they would naturally want to embrace keeping it nice. This was the case with many of my students who had already dubbed part of the space Teribithia after the book. The group of girls who played in this area would often go and play there after school as well. They had buy in. Most of the other students in my class did as well and understood the importance, however most students needed constant reminders to respect our space. I found this frustrating. In the end, I realized that it wasnt my class but the younger K-1 class who continued to trample the bushes with my students occasionally forgetting and regressing. This made sense to me because the only time the younger students discussed these topics were during the recess and lunch times whereas my students were learning about it through classroom units in different ways discussed throughout my research. My hope was that my students would become responsible environmentalists and give helpful reminders to the other classes not to trample the plants or litter. This continued to be a work in progress. In a speech given at Columbia University, Daisaku Ikeda argues that in order for global citizenship education to have meaning it needs to be a part of everyday habits in the community around us (1996). Continuing to encourage students to take care of this area daily helped them to continue their journey to becoming global citizens. Cinderella Stories from Around the World Learning stories from other places in the world is important because we could learn culture and traditions. Barbara I have always been interested in doing a unit on Cinderella Around the World unit. This year was the perfect time to learn about this story on a global scale. I tried to choose Cinderella stories connected to the students family origins and to our study of Africa, which we had begun through our Pen Pals in Guinea and our Peace Corp Correspondence match, Tanzania Dave (more on that in Section four of this chapter). We ended up reading one story per week. We read the story and would work through the characters, setting, plot, theme, and an interesting fact about the country of origin. We would then discuss how the culture was different and similar to our culture. This unit hit on our kid friendly global citizen characteristic of We understand that people around the world have different cultures and react to things differently.

The books I chose to investigate were as follows: The original Cinderella story entitled Cinderella or The Glass Slipper by Charles Perrault, the Disneyland version of Cinderella, Mufaros Beautiful Daughters from Africa, The Irish Cinderlad from Ireland (about a boy Cinderella), Cindrellan from the Carribean, and The Golden Sandal from the Middle East. With each story we would first discuss what we noticed about the cover and what country it was from and what connection we had to the country. I printed out mini pictures of the covers of the books. Together as a class, we would add them to the map of the world on the Global Bulletin Board and discuss how close the country of origin was to other units we were studying. For example, we were connected to Mufaros Beautiful Daughters through our study of our pen pals and Mr. David. We were connected to The Golden Sandal and Cindrellan because some of our students either had a family member who had come from the books country of origin or they had come from the country of origin themselves. At this point we had both the family history collages and the book cover minis on the global bulletin board. I then put up all of our discussion points on another bulletin board. I copied color pictures of the front cover of each book to make it more visually inviting. The students and parents loved to look at this bulletin board as well. I had parents from other classes take pictures of the board because they wanted to recreate it with their own students. The students loved the stories and loved reading the different types of stories. The boys especially liked the story the Irish Cinderlad because it was about a boy. For the Irish Cinderlad, I discussed what it was like when I went to Ireland. I talked about how kind the people are there and how they would offer you anything you needed. I also brought in my pictures that I had taken during my trip. The students loved looking at the pictures. They also

loved looking at how funny I looked when I had gone there (over ten years ago).

Throughout this whole unit we discussed culture and our similarities and differences. However, I would have loved to spend more time comparing and contrasting our cultures to help students get a better appreciation of different cultures around the world. As a follow up to this unit I asked a journal prompt several weeks after we had finished it. The journal prompt was, Why do you think it is important to learn about stories from other places in the world?. No pre-discussion was had except for a group discussion on what the students thought before they went and wrote. I did not elaborate on anything the students themselves said so I thought it was a pretty good indicator of their own thinking on this topic. It was also an indicator to me that the topics we had been discussing had lasting meaning with the students. As Dewey stated, attentive care must be devoted to the conditions which give each present experience a worthwhile meaning. (1938, p. 49). I felt I had been putting in the care needed for the experiences we were engaged in but, as a teacher, I am always thinking about how much more I should have done. Through journal prompts and discussion I was able to observe the meaning students were internalizing from each experience. I think it is important because you can understand other peoples differences and folktales can help you and understand them and that is why I think folktales are important. Sally (2nd grade) Learning about stories around the world is important because then you can learn other cultures. Also, if you need to understand someone from another country you can use stories. Stories with a moral can be helpful if you dont know how to act in a certain situation. Also, stories from around the world can help you understand whats happening in other countries. Knowing what is around you can help you be smart in sticky situations. Elly (3rd grade)

I think learning about stories from other places in the world is important because you can learn about them so you know what their life different from us here and so we know about the world. John (2nd grade) I think learning about stories from all over the world is important because we learn stuff from the stories. Like never be greedy or be kind or respect other or dont be mean. Shawn (2nd grade) I think learning about stories from other places is the world because hearing different versions of the stories in America to the stories in China will tell about their culture. Also, hearing the stories from different places and countries in the world might interest you and you may want to learn more about that country. And you may want to learn about other countries which will make you a better citizen and it will teach you by learning more about the countries to be aware of the world around you. Then maybe after youve learned a lot about that country you could go there and help them with their problems. Sandy (3rd grade) I think learning about stories from other places is important because you might understand people better you also might know their cultures better. You might also understand what they do for a living. Learning about other places is important because of this. You might also learn what they play with or do. Like a toy made out of wood or you will also might learn what music they make like wood instruments. Kacey (3rd grade) I learned several things from this unit. First, as Noddings highlighted in Educating Citizens for Global Awareness, educating for global citizenship requires us to value the lives of all people. (2005, p. 17). By working through this unit and asking the reflection and response journals students got a real sense of the value of people and their cultures in other parts of the world. Students learned about the differences but also the similarities. Next, connecting the Cinderella stories to the students family histories really helped them solidify their understanding of different cultures and how culture influences how a story is told. Through the above quotes, I also learned that even though I did not engage the students in as much discussion, reflection, and activities as I had hoped to in relation to culture it still had a lasting impression on them. The fact that they understood that people around the world have different cultures and we need to value and respect our differences was a great discovery for me. Even more so, that this thought had a lasting impression on my students helped me to realize that even when we dont do as much as we want in our classrooms, students can still walk away with solid understanding of a concept.