Last Friday was the third and last full-day for the “People in Transition” program.

In the morning, people shared their experiences and plans for their Take the Lead projects as a whole group. In the next few weeks people will be carrying out their projects:

• a book discussion at the Clark Middle School in Lexington
• an open house and meeting for Woburn teachers at the Woburn Historical Society
• discussion of an original film by one of the participants at Diamond Middle School in Lexington
• an online discussion for teachers in Burlington
• at the Kennedy Middle School in Woburn, one participant is setting up a large map and inviting the faculty to add pins to each country from which they have students.

After the Take the Lead check-in, participants worked in small groups mapping the course activities onto the inquiry cycle and working in cross-district lesson study groups. In this variation on lesson study, each group is identifying one or more documents to hold in common, and each person in the group is designing a lesson that have students work with the document. Most groups spent the morning settling on their shared document.

Lexington and Woburn Middle School teachers working with the inquiry cycle.

Somerville, Lexington, and Woburn history teachers discussing lesson study and mapping course activities onto the inquiry cycle.

In the afternoon, we visited New Lands Farm, a refugee farmer collective in Sutton, Massachusetts. This is a program of Lutheran Social Services coordinated by Ashley Carter, who hosted our visit. The farmers we met live in Worcester and the farm provides transportation to the fields every day for 4-6 hours. They work around second jobs and family schedules, growing crops for family consumption and to sell at farmers markets in Worcester and for CSA shares. At the farmers markets, they specialize in selling hard-to-find produce from their home countries to the immigrant community.

Ashley Carter, the program coordinator for New Lands Farm, introduced us to the farmers and helped us communicate through the language barrier. The man in black is the senior farmer, beginning his fourth growing season. Photo credit: Rosemary DeSousa

We met several men from Bhutan who had spent many years in a refugee camp in Nepal but were eventually displaced when the government changed. They had been in America between four years and nine months.We also met several farmers from Burundi who had spent time in camps in Tanzania before being resettled to the U.S. The farmers generously took time from their work to speak with us and share their thoughts and their stories, as well as answering our questions about their involvement with the farm.

Farmers from Bhutan during our visit. They shared that they bring their children to the fields sometimes, but that their children, being raised in the U.S., do not know how to farm. They are learning other things. Photo credit: Rosemary DeSousa

Talking with farmers from Burundi by way of Congo and Tanzania, who stopped their work to share stories and explain why they can’t return home.

We were reminded of the wide variety of experiences among immigrants on our way back to the bus, when we had a chance to speak to Mary and Daniel, two immigrants from Kenya who came separately to America in retirement because their children were here. Mary was a K-8 teacher and Daniel was a mechanic in Kenya. They shared their love to farm in addition to their work of caring for two adults in their home who are ill and unable to care for themselves. They were pleased to share their stories with us and we really enjoyed hearing from them. One person in our group named this as a highlight of the day.

The school year program is at its mid-point which should put us right in the middle of our inquiry into “People in Transition: Refugees, Migrants, and Receiving Communities in America.” At this point we have explored a lot of different stories and contextual information, and we’re right in the rich mess of generating lots of questions and beginning to go further down the paths of inquiry that have opened to us–as a group, to some extent, but probably even more as individuals.

The group of 24 represent Burlington, Bedford, Woburn, Lexington, Somerville, and Minuteman High School, and serve grades K-12. Participants are doing two projects in this course. In a modified version of lesson study, groups of 4-5 will identify one or more documents to use in a lesson, and a shared learning goal for students. Each person will design a lesson that fits in their curriculum, teach, and reflect on the lesson. One of the teachers will act as a host for a cross-district school visit, so that each group will get to watch students experience one of the group members’ lessons and then debrief and share their students’ experiences afterwards.

A second project is new to this program and designed for project sustainability: in “Take the Lead,” participants will be holding events in their districts intended to foster conversation among peers about education. Book discussion groups, mapping the countries of origin of students in the school, visiting a local historical society, and discussions sharing instructional practices are all in the works.

We’re happy to announce that registration is now open for the winter-spring 2013 program, “People In Transition: Refugees, Migrants, and Receiving Communities in America.”

This program is intended as an inquiry into a part of American society doesn’t get a lot of our attention, yet which has been an integral part of the American story from its beginning. We’ll do all the regular stuff of learning: talking and listening, reading and writing, visiting and bringing back, through book discussions, workshops, technology, a field trip, and creating lessons.

We want to honor the people who are/have been in transition in America by undertaking a serious effort to better understand their experiences. The things we’ll be reading and looking at, where possible, are from their perspectives. We’ve invited individuals to speak to us, and will travel to a farm where some people from one of the groups we’ll be studying work. We’ll also hear from people who study the historical and social context and from those who provide services. We’ll also seek an understanding of the experiences of those in receiving communities, but our primary emphasis in this course will be on the immigrants/migrants.

We hope you’ll consider signing up!

[Register]  [See Course Details] 

Last Wednesday night, the participants from the summer institute “A World Brought Ashore” met at the Burlington Central Office to catch up on the beginning of the school year and share some classroom connections they have made from the institute to the classroom. Mark Foster, one of the authors we read this summer, joined us to talk about the process of creating Whale Port,  the phenomenal book he wrote and his father illustrated about a fictional whaling town in New England from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries.

The participants created lessons inspired by the institute, taught them, and reflected on them in write-ups which we’re working on adding to our database site (in process). Many of these used the book Whale Port. Many of the lessons also tried out various ways of teaching with objects and using inquiry. We are looking forward to sharing these terrific resources with you sometime early next year. By “early” I mean in the first 1/6 of the year.

We also tried out using Voicethread to create a group reflection online, to include even those who could not attend on Wednesday night. The topic is the trip itself using a “Save the Last Word for Me” activity. Each person contributed two photos, one “connection” from the trip, and one “tension” that the trip left them with. In groups of three, the two other members of the group were asked to use the comments to speculate on what tension or connection the photo represents. Finally, the person who contributed the photos is to comment and explain their thoughts. The commenting is still going on but we invite you to view at the Voicethread below.

During the study tour, participants chronicled and reflected on their experiences by writing posts to a group blog. We also posted the lesson plans and digital stories that travellers created after the trip on that site. A beautiful set of photos from the trip was created by Stephanie Pilinko and can be viewed here.