April 28, 2011
As I began to assemble my portfolio in a form that would make sense to my viewers, I had an epiphany. Along the way and throughout the year, I have been reflecting through conversations with colleagues and through writing. You can see my thought process through my previous posts. However, it wasn't until I began organizing and selecting a range of student work to show to my viewers, that I realized how much more learning had taken place, for me and the students. As I began putting together a sampling of work created by the students from the ISB, China and our students at YHS, Maine, USA, I realized how similar many of our assignments were and/or how many are strongly influenced by each other.
My original Collaborative Inquiry question was, "What is the impact on students' learning when they complete, share, and react to a common assessment with students from another culture?". However, the more work I did with Kendra, I felt like the question should be changed to "What is the impact on instruction and student learning when two teachers from different parts of the world collaborate?" The second question gets at the vast learning that I gained through my collaboration with Kendra. I do think that our collaboration had an impact on student learning, but not just because students have done similar assignments and shared work, but because Kendra and I have been collaborating for over a year now, strengthening our programs, and sharing resources.
There are several examples of how our collaboration has impacted student learning. Students, both this semester and last semester were able to participate in a Skype. Both sets of students enjoyed the process, felt it was worthwhile and a good learning experience. Students also expressed that they learned about the culture of China and how different and similar the lives of the teenagers in Beijing are as compared to their own.
Both Kendra's students and my students completed similar weekly assignments: Keep it Simple, Shadows, Portraits, Out of the Window, and We are what We Eat. Students posted their work on the Ning and frequently students from both ISB and YHS shared feedback. Kendra and I also created voicethreads for some of these assignments and posted on the Ning so that the images were all in one place and students could comment more easily. There were other assignments that our students also completed that were similar as well. Please visit the collaborative project links to see them.
While searching through the hundreds of images on our Ning, I realized how powerful the Culture Clash Assignment really was for students. This assignment was also inspired by a similar project that Kendra does with her students. I asked students to look through the images of the Beijing students and our images and combine, fragment, and juxtapose several images to make a "surreal" photo montage" that communicates "Cutlure Clash". The power stems from the students really looking carefully at many different images from the ISB students and our students; through this process they are noticing similarites and differences between our cultures. Students talked about this in their reflections of the assignment; it was so reinforcing to hear it from the students!
It was fascinating for me to see the huge influence that our collaboration has had on my Photo 1 curriculum. As I was sorting through the work, I saw so many similarities in the quality of the work from both groups of students. What has helped to make this collaboration so successful is that Kendra and I have similar expectations and standards for student artwork and writing. It is impressive to see the caliber of both groups of students to be so high! While subject matter may separate us in some instances, the concepts and quality are clearly evident and a high level of learning can be observed through all student work!
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