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Sender: American Memory Fellows <AMFELLOWS@RS8.LOC.GOV>
Poster: Laura Wakefield <Laurawake@AOL.COM>
Subject: 97 Fellows still at it!
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Greetings: I am enjoying and learning form all the messages from the 98'
fellows and thought you might be interested to hear from some 97 fellows who
are still at it. Joy (who teaches gifted students grades 6-8) and I (who
teach 8th grade History and have students that range from at-risk to above
average) worked last year on an oral history project using the FSA and
American Life Histories collections primarily. Students worked with the two
collections to select, edit, and illustrate a life history. Then students
were to conduct their own interview of a living person who had migrated to
Central Florida from somewhere else, tape record and then transcribe their
life history and illustrate the history with a photograph of the person. The
results were quite surprising to me because several students who had not
produced a quality piece of work all year did an outstanding job. All the
students were able to complete the task. Encouraged, Joy and I wrote a "Break
the Mold" grant last spring to expand the idea to create a Living History
Museum to showcase the students work this year. We were awarded $1,500 for
the grant. We decided to use the theme of Heroes and their admirable
qualities and to have students create a memorial that could represent the
achievements, characteristics, or experiences of their interviewee. The
memorials will be showcased/displayed at a Living History Museum Gala. We
used some of the grant money to rent the local Arts Center and the Gala will
be held in three weeks (on the evening of April 5th) for the students, their
families and their interview subjects. This year I was able to enlist the
support of the Language Arts teacher to work with the students on their
interviewing skills, to help them create open-ended interview questions and
provide in-class opportunities for them to edit their writing. Today they
turned in their typed transcripts of the interviews. They now must excerpt a
particularly interesting part of the interview to create a one to two page
"hero story" for publication. The grant will pay for the printing and binding
of these stories. We have found some interesting situations this year which I
don't remember having last year. We explained the whole project to the
students and sent home a parent letter about it and spent time in class
reading hero stories and discussing heroic attributes. Then we went to the
tech lab and spent a week learning about the collections, reading and
selecting a life history to excerpt and edit. We thought things were clicking
along fine when we began to get questions that made us realize that some
students were not initially making the connection between what they did in the
tech lab with the life histories in American Memory and what they were doing
with their own interviews. We also found some who did not connect that their
practicing for their interviews with the Language Arts teacher was related to
what they saw as their "history interview" project. Others used the interview
questions they wrote in language arts so literally that if they asked their
subject a question they began looking at the next question instead of
listening to the response and asking a clarification question related to what
was said. It has reminded me that abstract thinking, which is critical to
this project, is not fully developed in many 8th graders. The only other
differences between this years project and last years is that this year we are
on a block schedule and I am collaborating with the language arts teacher this
year. Although the synthesis of our project will not be fully realized until
April 5th, we will be sharing our ideas with other teachers this Thursday.
Judy Graves, Joy and I will be presenting a three hour workshop at the Florida
Educational Technology Conference in Orlando "Creative Teaching with American
Memory". We will share some of our student work with you all next month.
Wish us luck!
Laura Wakefield
97 Fellow
Neptune Middle School
2727 Neptune Road
Kissimmee, Florida 34744
LauraWake@aol.com
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