E2 – Internship Entry

April 24, 2014 at 4:25 pm | Posted in E2 | Leave a comment
Tags: E2, Internship

E2 – Exemplify collaboration within the school. Collaboration within a school invites creativity, shared knowledge and engaging students in multiple modes of thinking, doing, and producing. My internship school is a model of frequent collaboration. Throughout the year, teachers seek new ways to bring together different disciplines in a single unit, including ties between Humanities, language, math, art and sciences. For example, the start of my internship was a collaborative unit between our Humanities department and the Science department. The scientific subject matter was Darwinism – the theory of evolution, natural selection, and the shift of radical scientific thought. Our Humanities focus was the adoption of Darwinist theories to society, politics and economics – namely Social Darwinism and its results in terms of eugenics, justifying social stratification, and promoting an ideal race. While students were studying plants, animals and geological evidence in Biology, we were discussing philosophers like Herbert Spencer and Francis Galton and their economic counterparts like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.

It was fascinating to witness students making astute connections between their Biology work and our Humanities discussions. The collaborative unit clearly allowed students to develop a comprehensive view about these topics, to understand how a radical scientific discovery could heavily influence society in terms of thought, action and policy. In addition, students were able to make personal and cultural connections to the material, which generated very passionate and interesting class discussions: for instance, we examined how the theory of evolution collided with many religious notions, and still causes controversy today. In a summative assessment for this unit, students made a case for whether or not evolution or creationism should be taught in schools. They produced very thoughtful and passionate responses that demonstrated their learning across these two disciplines and personal convictions. A snapshot of one of the student responses is to the right.

In sum, I think this unit demonstrated the benefits of collaboration within school: enriching student learning by engaging multiple modes of thinking, and inviting students to make meaningful connections across subject matter. Learning from this experience, I would love to engage students in another collaborative project before my internship is done. Our next large unit is Imperialism, and I have already emailed the Drama teacher to ask for her ideas about plays that deal with this theme. Here is a snapshot of my email:

My hope is to incorporate drama excerpts to activate student expression in the form of dramatic readings and body movement, in order to employ critical thinking in a more physical way that will supplement our reading, writing and speaking discourse.  As Medina (2008) emphasizes, engaging a subject matter through multiple senses allows us to build richer memories and engage more deeply with it. It also is a chance for students with strengths in acting and performing to gain confidence in material by experiencing it through dramatization. I look forward to implementing this future collaboration!

Resource: Medina, J. (2008) Brain Rules. Seattle, WA: Pear Press.