Day 1:  An INTERNATIONAL Beginning

by Allison Archer

So, here I sit, late in the day on Monday.  So many things have happened today that I am feeling overwhelmed and very excited.  I think back to the very beginning of all of this.  Last year, around this time, Wes Wehunt and I embarked on an ambitious journey.  As a culminating project to our Master's degrees in Education, we had a crazy idea to create two things.  The first creation was an international curriculum framework for students in an entire school of grades K-8.  The second part of the assignment was to create a Master's level class for educators to brush up on thier technology skills through this experience.  We worked hard and it came down to the wire.  If either of us had become ill or had an unforeseen problem, this project would never have happened.  It was almost too ambitious for our own good.  Our university professor, Dr. Shelly Haser, at Marymount University, advised us that a project of this magnitude had never been attempted by students like us in the timeframe we were given.  No one was more surprised than Wes and myself when we successfully completed this project.

But, the next step was still waiting.  Where could we implement this project?  Could it actually be done?  With Wes' departure to Georgia at the end of June, 2007, it looked like this might not be possible.  With Wes' permission, I begged John Zurn and Joan Jones to consider implementing the international curriculum part of our project.  They were both excited to use it and I began to see this project's future implementation as a possibility.

The project hinges on some critical elements.  These elements unify the entire school around a presecribed set of questions and experiences.  Although each grade level works to learn about different countries and at varying developmental levels, all students will seek answers to common, essential questions.  These questions are over-arching and can be applied to all grade levels.  Another crucial element is the "shared experiences" which all students in all grades will experience at some point on thesame day.  These are usually songs or stories that extend student's understanding of global citizenship.

Today is the beginning of beginnings. To give you an idea of all that I have seen today, I'll give a brief synopsis.  My day began in my own, second grade classroom.  After returning from chapel, we spent time discussing life in America and how life in Thailand might be similar or different.  The children knew surprisingly little about life in Thailand which made for a very interesting KWL chart.  Common misconceptions like all people in Asia only eat with chopsticks and other ideas like this were prevalent.  I corrected none of them and can't wait to see their faces as they discover new, hidden truths.  (We'll record any changes to our KWL chart as we go).  After this, we watched a short video created by other children who had traveled to Thailand and created "News" reports.  This format was exciting for the students.  After this, we read a folktale called "Crow and Peacock" which carried a moral concerning vanity.  The children were excited to read this story together and illustrate its events. 

After lunch, I stopped in to sixth grade.  They were creating international posters.  They were all thumbing through books from different countries and planning out their posters in small groups. I was especially excited to se a small group of students drawing the Taj Mahal and reading about it together.  My plan was to film more groups of students in other grades but my time was quite limited today.  I stopped into first grade and Mr. Fangboner had just finished brush painting with the students in his class and they were listening to Chinese music.  The brush paintings were amazing and will soon be posted on the first grade page.

At the end of the day, I saw students leaving St. John's discussing one of the shared experiences of the day.  All students listened to "If Everyone Cared" by Nickelback today and I listened to one teacher tell me of the students' response to this powerful piece of music.  The students organically came up with the reason for this song's importance in relation to global citizenship.  I can see the intentional pieces of this project were meaningful to students at various grade levels.

Tomorrow will be an exciting continuation...