Hello Everyone,
My group and I are working on an Immigration Unit Plan in which we will be focusing on the immigrants that immigrated to our country from Ireland and China leading up to and around the time of our Civil War. We have discussed using many aspects of technology and tying our unit to the community in which our students live as well.
We believe that one of the bests ways our anyone can learn is collaboratively either with each other or others. We would love for our students to reach out into our community to either Irish or Chinese immigrants and learn from them what they would otherwise learn from a textbook. We have seen so many times that this type of explorative and collaborative learning is so effective.
We have also reached out to members of our community in the building of our Unit Plan. These people are either members of the teaching community or specialist in the area of immigration. It is important for us to utilize these people to create the most effective lesson plans for our students to learn from.
Lastly, we would love to incorporate guest speakers into our unit that can come into at least one of our classes to speak with our students about what it means to be an immigrant and the reality of being an immigrant as well. Again, it is our belief that students will learn from these speakers more effectively than from a textbook!
I look forward to hearing your feedback about my thoughts!!
-Meaghan
Meaghan, I agree that using people from the community to come speak in the classroom will be a better tool than a textbook. Students cannot ask textbooks questions and receive responses in return, but students can interact with people. They can ask questions and find answers.
ReplyDeleteI agree that genuine testimonies of experience are a wayyyy better means for understanding than the cold-hard-fact textbooks, which lack the details that only the human memory can provide. I feel like students really need to connect on that level to become interested in and sensitive to what they are being taught.
ReplyDelete