Guiding Question and Reflection
Old question: What can I learn from the Uruguayan approach to “taking action” to design and implement meaningful, cross-disciplinary opportunities for students in my school?
New: How can global projects in general be implemented to develop student changemakers in our school community?
Reflection:
When we were developing our guiding question - we were explicitly told that the question may change or morph over time and I didn’t quite understand why that would be until I was in Uruguay. From the start I was very interested in figuring out how to use my project and guiding questions to help students become changemakers in their community - using the fourth pillar of global learning as my focal point. The whole time I was only thinking from the lens of working with high school students.
As the time came closer to departing for Uruguay, I learned I would be paired with an elementary school and a bit of panic set in as I had to rethink how I would make my guiding question work and also how I could use what I learned in the schools in my own school community and classroom. I originally started with the idea of creating a mentorship between high school students and younger students with a focus on the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development goals. We started by doing a Zoom conference between my students and a sixth grade class in Uruguay.
When I got to Uruguay, I felt even more inspired to expand upon this after visiting a rural school just outside of Montevideo. It was such a small school with only about 100 students total, but the work they were doing in environmental science and The GLOBE program from NASA was incredible. Then, we went to Minas where I was able to continue the collaboration we had started with my students on using the Sustainable Development goals to inspire changemakers in the classroom. I brought posters with me that my students made to propose local solutions to global problems. At that school, we selected contamination and pollution as a locally solvable issue. I modeled a similar lesson to what my students did and they proposed solutions to the contamination and pollution of their community.
My guiding question started a bit narrow minded with the lens of “how can I learn what is done in Minas to take action” and it rapidly blossomed into “how can global projects in general be implemented to develop student changemakers in our school community.” By shifting my focus, I opened the door to not only future collaboration opportunities, but also opened the door to share with my school community so they too can start developing student change makers in their classrooms.