Predecessors to Pioneers

My goodness, it's been a long time since I've posted to this blog. I have been busily working, though.

This year, I am doing my master's project, and it finally has a title: Predecessors to Pioneers. It will be a five-week multidisciplinary unit, beginning in February, on the Kingdom of Jordan, in which students will study the rich culture and history of that country and create new works inspired by the old. I will lead the project but will co-teach with the art, dance, and upper elementary teachers. As the project takes shape, I'll post more!

I was inspired for this idea by reading an article in Wired magazine (http://www.wired.com/2014/10/on-learning-by-doing/), written by Harvard professor David Edwards. In the article, Edwards discusses how the future America will not look like the current one, and if we continue to teach America's youth using a curriculum based on today's world, we are setting them up for failure. 

On a related note, yesterday I was perusing a couple of last year's Nat Geo magazines, and I came across a photo study on "The Changing Face of America" in the October issue. Check out these lovely multiracial faces. 

I am so excited to move forward with the Predecessors to Pioneers project and share the resulting works my students come up with. There is this wonderful mixture: the set of infinite possibilities that can come from the kids, and the accompanying teacherly stress of the unknown coming from my coworkers. I am very hopefully optimistic. 

I look at the faces in the pictures above, and I speculate that we must come up with a matching broader range of teaching practices than what we currently lay in front of our public school children. I am sad that I must first start in Montessori, because I have a fear that I may become one of the articles I am studying, that test a method one time in one school of privileged children and never take it farther. I must resolve to not become what I study, but move beyond it.