Field Trip: Girl Rising

For the field trip, I chose to go to a showing of Girl Rising in the University Center hosted by the International House on October 23rd. The documentary shows the horrors that women all over the world go through in order to get an education and also things that can happen to women if they are not educated and ways they have to resort to living. The film was split up into individual stories of young women. I wanted to briefly discuss parts of the stories of three of the young women to give a glimpse into what the documentary was about.

A common theme throughout all the stories was persistence. These young girls persisted on and keep pushing towards a better future for themselves even as they had horrible things happen to them. The first girl they showed on the film was named Wadley. She is eight years old from Haiti. Before the earthquake, they showed her enjoying school. After the hurricane, the teacher of her class was charging the children's parents money to keep the school going. She tried to turn Wadley away, and Wadley told her that she was going to keep coming back everyday even though they had no money. It was inspiring to see that a child who had her home completely destroyed still wanted to be a part of school and a part of the learning community with her classmates. Her teacher shocked me though, because I did not expect that she would turn students away for lack of money after a natural disaster like that.

Another girl, Suma, from Nepal in the film was also really persistent in her education but also in wanting freedom for all young women. When she was very young, her parents sold her to a Master so that she would have a place to live and food to eat since they were very poor. She talked about the horrors of abuse that her Masters put her through, and she talked about how songs kept her going through the abuse. She would sing songs and make up songs about her everyday life as she worked.

A teacher was a lodger in Suma's third Master's home. He convinced Suma's Master to let Suma enroll in a night class with other kumlari, unpaid workers. The class was run by social workers, and the teacher stood up to the Master about the laws of domestic violence and labor laws. He also talked to the Master about human trafficking and injustice. The teacher was also persistent every time that the Master said he would not free Suma, the teacher came back. Eventually the Master let the teacher take Suma home to her family. Suma now goes with other social workers and teachers to the homes of Masters with kumlari and advocates persistently for those young women's freedom like the teacher did for her.

Suma's songs kept her going through the horrors of being a kumlari. Ruksana, a young girl in India, had a similar hope in art as a street girl. In one of her classes, she was kicked out for drawing instead of listening. On the way home her sister kept telling her how angry her father would be at her. The father's response was perfect I think. When she got home, he took her to an art store and bought her a sketchbook and pencils for her to draw in. He talked to her about how it was really important that she had an education and was able to break the chain of poverty living in the street. He said her sketch book was for art and to please do her school work in her school books. Throughout her story, her family wouldn't have money to put food on the table and eventually their slum was torn down and they had no where to live at all, but the father was set on how important it was that his daughters have an education.

To me personally, I thought it was really interesting the links of art and music almost as symbols of hope in these desperate places. Art is something that is very important to me personally, and I think this shows the great importance of the subject to people in general but especially children. In my future classroom, I want to make sure that I always have art materials around and encourage exploration with them but also just doodling. Even if it's a huge mess or not an actual "picture", the motions of making art can be therapeutic and really great with the fine motor strength required to make accurate letters.

Ch. 8 Questions

1. On p. 252, Ormrod talks about the importance of note taking to understanding classroom information for upper elementary and older students. Can you think of a way to have younger elementary school students process information in similar ways as taking notes without having them sit down at their desks and take notes? [applying, creating]

2. According to Ormrod, what are two different types of learning strategies? (Hint: they are both highlighted in a green color; p. 251-54) [remembering]

Constructivist Concepts // Service Learning

I find the whole concept of service learning to be really interesting. Ormrod (2011) explains that service learning not only helps the students but the outside community as well. I also found on the San Diego Unified School District page a handout of ideas for service learning that included direct and indirect activities along with a section called advocacy, which Ormrod doesn't mention in the text.

I think an example of service learning that I could see using in my future classroom (early childhood) would be having the children create art to take to nursing homes or mail to soldiers overseas. I think this would help the children learn basic writing and drawing skills as well as open doors for conversation with children about different family compositions (like having a parent overseas or having a grandparent in a nursing home). We could also talk about different emotions and abstract concepts like empathy. Those are difficult to explain to young children, but I think with activities like this it could be more real.

I think the students would be so excited to get to show their work to others. Young children typically love to draw pictures to give to loved ones. It would also add an interesting motivation for them to do this drawing work knowing that they would be giving it away to other people. I would really love if the children could each be assigned a different person to make a card for, like a specific person at the nursing home and then be able to go and physically hand it to them themselves.

Some obstacles to this would be that it could be considered not "academic" enough by some principals. It would also be hard to get children physically to the nursing home to deliver the mail. Sending cards overseas to military personnel would be difficult to explain to the children concepts of war. It would also be impossible if our country wasn't in a war.

Personally I love the idea of service learning. I think it is so important to instill in even young children the importance of caring for others not only in our classroom but outside of it too. I can definitely see myself incorporating lots of projects like this for literacy lessons with young children. It provides a purpose to their work that writing an imaginary letter on a worksheet would not.




References

Ormrod, J. E. Educational psychology: Developing Learners. (7th ed.)

San Diego Unified School District (2010). Learn and Serve San Diego: A service learning handbook for elementary teachers. http://www.sandi.net/cms/lib/CA01001235/Centricity/Domain/62/Current%20CRD%20Web%20Docs/Elementary%20Handbook%20Revised%20July%2010.pdf

Social Cognitivism vs Behaviorism Objectives

Ormrod (2011) says behaviorism "focuses on how environmental stimuli bring about changes in people's behaviors" (p. 285). To me this means what I do as a teacher combined with other stimuli in the child's life is what forms and shapes the child's behaviors. Essentially the child would be reacting to a set of reinforcers and punishers to exhibit the behaviors that I wanted them to exhibit in order to show me that they learned what I wanted them to learn.

If I was planning a lesson with a group of preschoolers on how to write the first letter of their name, I would look for the child to be able to do that task as a successful mark of learning that objective. They would have to complete the objective. I could use verbal encouragement as a positive reinforcement to encourage them to keep working at the task. (As a side note, this is not something that I would do in my classroom. My objective would be for the children to attempt to write the first letter of their name. I recognize that children at this age are at a wide range of developmental levels, and I wouldn't want to punish some children by withholding encouragement or a positive reinforcer because they weren't as developed as other children with fine motor and writing skills.)

From a social cognitivist perspective, I would have the children work together at a table each with paper and crayons to work on writing their letters. This way they would have other models to look form to see how to hold the crayon and make the marks for letters. I would look for signs of interests and attempts at learning to write. As a social-cognitivist, I would also remember that "new learning doesn't always reveal itself immediately but may instead be reflected in the students' behaviors at a later time" (Ormrod, 2011, p. 325).

With the self-regulation piece of social cognitivism, I would want to continue to give the children in my class verbal cues about staying on task, but I would also be aware that the children are really young, and their attention spans are still quite short. That is something that I think some teachers and adults forget with young children. I would say it is developmentally inappropriate to have the children sitting at desks doing "seat work" for extended periods of time (more than 5 minutes). Their self-regulation can increase by working at hands-on tasks for extended periods of time or working at a puzzle day after day and increasing time worked on it daily.

References: 

Ormrod, J.E. (2011). Educational Psychology: Developing Learners. Boston, MA: Pearson.