Community Well-Being Interdisciplinary Unit
What Do You See in These Photos?
WHAT
Grade 9 Students used knowledge, skills, and understandings from both Biology and Language and Literature to engage in an interdisciplinary Service as Action project that explored both science and messaging on wellness: that meet the prompt, “Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”
Teachers launched a provocation to students showing them that if we really do want to care about the well-being of our community, we are going to have to use our knowledge of biological systems to design actions. At the same time, if we were to actually influence our community, we would have to know how to effectively communicate and inspire change.
In these pictures the students are experiencing a simulation of this whole process, deconstructing wellness messaging, before diving into the interdisciplinary study.
WHY
Inherent and fundamental to Empathy to Impact and the IB Program is the ability to transfer interdisciplinary knowledge to real-world contexts and create opportunities for students to take action. Often, schools struggle to identify what holistic wellbeing means to a community and the interconnected nature of the different domains of wellness and the interdisciplinary nature of learning.
HOW
The Biology and Language and Literature teachers met to design the interdisciplinary unit, designed clarifications of check-in points, developed resources for two subjects to support one another, and co-created reflection protocols.
By launching the Interdisciplinary unit with a call to action, students identified a focus area of well-being that they wanted to investigate. They researched about the biological elements of well-being issues relevant to their community, while learning how to build empathy with their target audience, anticipate various viewpoints, and appeal to logic, emotion, and authority systems.
Students created a variety of media pieces, consistently reflected on processes, demonstrated their intentional application of content information, and engaged with community action and feedback.
Explore some of the student work below:
Thank you
SFS teachers Alisha Feitosa, Sakhar Nair, Elisaus Pangiraj, Rebecca Emerich, Sheila Yap, Jake Breedlove, and Michael Farrant, for their ingenuity, collaboration, risk-taking, and for successfully connecting academic excellence, deeper thinking, and community impact.