Seventh-grade students interviewed people who impact their lives beyond school and, with consent, posted the interviews on our class blog to share. They focused on what being 13 was like in different decades and different places in the world. Our stories span the globe.
Everyone around us has a story, and if we can hear it, we can get a little bit closer to being a community that respects and cares for one another.
In order to be heard, to be understood, we need to learn more than digital tools. We are learning how to ask questions and listen, but we are also learning how to bear witness to each others lives, to recognize every single life matters equally and infinitely.
The Community Story Project is an opportunity to participate in and facilitate meaningful interviews beyond school to support our school community in understanding the people, places, and times that support who we are and who we are becoming.
Students prepared to conduct interviews and then did research on the historical time period before writing a brief narrative of their interview experience on our school blog. During the testing week, students listened to these interviews when they completed testing to make meaningful use of downtime, and we also created a few listening days so that students could have plenty of time to listened to the stories of our school community.
The encounter of coming together with another human being makes possible understanding and sensitivity to diverse cultures and ways of being in the world. Stories teach us this empathy.
We hope this project can be the bridge between school and the homes and lives of the people who walk the halls of our school.
Listen. Enjoy.
Interviews (click here)
Plum-Grove-Community-Story-Project_-13-in-19-something-Form-Responses-1-1-1A group of students from our school wrote a proposal to the National Council of the Teachers of English for their national convention in Baltimore, Maryland this fall, 2019. To learn more about their session and to support their travel expenses from Illinois to Maryland, please visit their Go Fund Me page. (This is not a school-sponsored trip.)
