Cross-curricular Collaboration for Deep Learning
Building models in the design studio at WAB.
Colleagues Angelia Crouch and Pim Arora at the Western Academy of Beijing were playing golf one day when a casual conversation sparked the genesis of a multi-layered, interdisciplinary learning experience.
“This story starts with the grade 9/10 design team,” explains Pim. “The design team is close-knit and we were evaluating our units. There’s a design unit that focuses on clocks, where students design and create clocks. At the end of that unit, I found myself disposing of 100 clocks that students didn’t want to take home. This became a great opportunity to to rethink the unit, the more responsible use of our resources, and how me might design a learning experience around a concept that is relevant to the lives of all of us.”
At the same time, Angelia, a social studies teacher, had just started a unit about migration with her ninth grade class.
“I teach Individuals and Societies, and I am really inspired by Paul Solopek, the National Geographic photographer walking across China as part of his Out of Eden journey. Harvard’s Project Zero has published materials about his experience, and I was able to contact him and he agreed to zoom in and talk to our students.”
This exceptional opportunity infused Angelia’s unit with energy. When Pim asked her if she was teaching anything related to refugees, Angelia said yes and she was keen to do more. This is where the collaboration took off.
Visual migration stories posted outside Angelia’s classroom.
“In my class, we were exploring voluntary and involuntary migration, along with phases of migration,” explains Angelia. “We talked about how we are all migrants, and students mapped their own migration story and thought about their potential future migration story.”
The migration phase of resettlement became a focus for the design teachers.
“In our classes, we picked up on the students’ learning about involuntary migration. They did additional research about the five top groups involved in involuntary migration,” says Pim. At the time, those groups were from South Sudan, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Syria and Myanmar (the Rohingya).
Pim interviewed her friend Jason Crislip, a refugee professional, about resettlement needs and learned that, in order for migrant communities to thrive in a new place, people need language centers, schools, day care centers, health care and several other key programs and facilities.
“Each group picked one thing that fosters a sense of belonging and then set to work designing that facility based on what they had learned,” recounts Pim. “They sketched the models and then prototyped them using wood, acrylics and 3-D printing.”
It took about 12 class periods for students to go from ideation to final product, and the models were curated in the high school (near Angelia’s classroom) so community members could peruse the exhibit and think about questions related to the refugee/involuntary migrant experience.
“We set the models up along some conceptual roads we created,” says Pim. “The last step is reflection so students can consider how the model would foster a sense of belonging.”
Meanwhile, in Individuals and Societies, Angelia’s students were working on creating newspaper articles about the process of migration, with a focus on the ‘care’ portion of the Empathy to Impact cycle. Supported by Inspire Citizens co-founder and facilitator Steve Sostak, Angelia’s students learned about the concept of engaging our head, heart and hands in learning about an issue.
“When I took Steve to the workshop to show him the models the students were creating in design class, he said ‘you have to tell this story!’,” Pim remembers.
Next year, Pim and Angelia hope to bring other colleagues on board to see if they can expand the nature of the interdisciplinary unit. Pim hopes that PE teachers might offer a unit called the refugee’s journey, featuring a camp experience and physical journey. Angelia hopes her English colleagues may consider theming the interview and photography lessons that occur at the same time with a focus on internal migration in China.
“I had some students ask me why we don’t do this type of thing with more units,” reflects Angelia. “It deepens their knowledge and they begin to see curricular connections. The more we can integrate our teaching and learning, the more it works for everyone.”
