In our last post, we wrote about using the "Building Hopes" website, or app, to create "Hope Sculptures." While we realize the value of technology, sometimes the simple act of looking, drawing, and coloring by hand is just as
effective.
Source: 6th Grade Student, ASIDE 2019
Our students in their leadership class used their Chromebooks to view the web version, in order to select the topics that were most important to them. They used social media to share them with others, but then they also constructed these hand-drawn sculptures to display in the library.
Source: 6th Grader, ASIDE 2019
Their drawings received a lot of attention from other students who wanted to know more about the designs, and so we thought we would share their visual creations with our followers.
It was touching to see how this exhibit led to lots of students thinking about hopeful things that were important to them, as well as wanting to know how to build their own sculptures to share.
Source: 6th Grader, ASIDE 2019
We were delighted to assist the students in this activity, and we posted the website on their student portal. They went straight to work, carefully selecting their choices to design their own personal, hope sculptures.
Source: 6th Grader, ASIDE 2019
Of course, we had plenty of colored pencils and paper around for them, too.
With so much turmoil this year across the political spectrum, with the upheaval in the economy, and with the constant headlines asking the question, "Why is there so much hate in society?," we found it hard at times to keep a positive attitude and neutral position in our classrooms. It's also no wonder that according to Google search trends for 2018, the world searched for "good" more than ever before; people needed something positive.
We did, too. We're sure that's why the "Building Hopes" visualization designed by Accurat caught our eye. It appeared on a list for top visualizations for 2018. This interactive visualizations lets users create "Hope Sculptures" by balancing rocks to represent the things that they are hopeful for. Ironically, the size and rotation of the rocks, including their direction and speed, are linked to Google Trends data on the topics that are chosen.
While the website lets you build "Hope Sculptures,” such as the images in this post, the mobile app, which can be downloaded from the App Store or Google Play, takes it to another level.
By walking closer toward the floating rocks, the topics appear for selection. The user needs to pick at least four in order to build and place his or her "Hope Sculpture." It can be placed down anywhere, such as the image at the beginning of this post.
There are ten different topics to choose from, and each rock can be weighted depending on how much hope there is for each one. They can be viewed by hopes or by topics, but what makes it even more interactive is how your hopes can be compared to others who participate in the project.
Once the sculpture is created, it can be used to access Google Trends data to see how people around the world are searching the same ideas, concepts, and movements. The size, rotation, direction and speed of the rocks represent different data trends.
We think letting students create their own hopes for 2019 would be an excellent way to begin the new year in our classrooms. Students can use this information to discover what others are hopeful for, and how passionately.
It provides an opportunity to think about what's important and to share ideas in an innovative way. It could be incorporated into classroom discussions or written reflections.
Hope is what we need for the future; it brings out the good in all of us.
With the continual barrage of news about gun violence in America, it's important that we use all available resources to help students give context to content, and visualizations help us do that. This motion graphic titled, 2015: A Year In Mass Shooting and produced by The Washington Post, is a powerful tool to educate young people about this issue. The headline, "374 mass shooting in 365 days in one extraordinary graphic," travels across the calendar year, pausing only once for the longest period without a shooting. As you watch, the headlines from newspapers around the country appear as the timeline progresses, but it is the voices from the 911 calls that capture the enormity of the human toll.
This motion graphic could easily be tied into any media or news literacy lesson using the headlines connected with the timeline of events. It is worth the watch with middle and high school students, and it is guaranteed to invite and spur discussions about the topic.
Last week, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) released the 2015 Global Peace Index (GPI) on its Vision of Humanity
website. As with our earlier posts on the topic of peace, and in particular the release of the 2013 and 2014 GPI, we believe that sharing these findings each year helps to establish a deeper understanding of the effects of peace on society. The resources available on the site provide educators with a variety of learning materials, including an interactive map, infographic highlights, and a short motion graphic explaining this year's report.
Unfortunately, while peace did not necessarily decline a great deal in 2015, the GPI for this year does reveal an increasingly more divided world. The motion graphic below helps to explain how the most
peaceful countries are enjoying increasing levels of peace and prosperity,
while the least peaceful countries spiral into violence and conflict.
In our classrooms, we receive countless questions from young learners regarding current events with reference to violence both in the United States and abroad. We suppose, too, that so much of what we teach in our history classes involves conflict, conquest, and seizure. It’s no wonder that we get this question every year, “Do you think there will ever be a time without war?” We can only reply with, “We hope so.” The strife and conflict in the news does not bode well for a better
answer, and if history is any indication, the prospect looks grim.
Nevertheless, we will do our part to educate young learners to be peacemakers, builders, and keepers. We need young people to believe in social justice, human rights, and peace. The more mindful we are about our actions, the greater the chance for change. This includes talking about divisive issues of racism, immigration, and sexual orientation. We don't want to think about the ramifications if we don't make peace part of the daily conversation. The more voices, the better. Make them heard by preparing now for the International Day Of Peace on September 21, 2015.
With the increasing questions we received from our sixth graders about the abhorrent news this past week, we realized they needed to do something to make them feel they were sending a positive message to help the world be a more peaceful place. Eleven- and twelve-year-olds hear the news, and most have far more access to content than their parents realize. Their questions abound and need an outlet. As middle school educators, we know this.
Source: ASIDE 2015
So with our friend and colleague, Francine Wisnewski (@fwisnewski), we decided to bring hearts and minds together to let the kids create a message to share on social media and with the school community. We asked them that each finished design somehow include a heart, map, and peace sign. That’s it. How they incorporated the criteria and with whom they worked, or not, was up to them.
We cherish the flexibility in our curricula that allows us to stop everything to promote mindfulness with our learners. It does not matter that the schedule listed math and history; we pulled the kids together to address their concerns about world conflict and violence.
Source: ASIDE 2015
We continually try to build the hearts and minds of our young learners to be peace builders, peacemakers, and peacekeepers. As adults, we understand the turmoil in the world, and sometimes we just have to stop to help them cope. It’s worth every minute. If we don’t, we lose the power of positive thinking that the world so much needs.
This summer we’ve seen unprecedented violence and conflict, from our own backyard in Ferguson, Missouri, to the Ukrainian-Russian border. We’re sure that our learners have seen it, too. Wherever the conflict is, you can rest assured the media is there in full force as well.
The sound bites, prompts, replays, jolts per minute never end. The hyped negativity abounds with each new event. The good news is relegated to filler material that is never enough to make anyone feel good for long. No wonder parents are reluctant to let their children watch the news. In some ways our media is like the Capitol of Panem in The Hunger Games spicing up the story to keep the masses engaged. In the competition for viewership, ratings matter.
So what is Peace Journalism? The principal founder of the concept is Johan Galtung. He claims that our common daily news should be classified as War Journalism, because it tends to present conflicts as endless battles, or war. According to the Center for Global Peace Journalism, the practice of “Peace Journalism is when editors and reporters make choices that improve the prospects for peace.” These journalists carefully choose their words to create an atmosphere favorable to peace in order to make non-violent solutions more visible and viable.
Now more than ever we need to include discussions about war and peace journalism as part of media literacy instruction in our classrooms. It's important to help learners sift through messages from the media to find ways to change the view from a culture where aggression sells to one that diffuses turmoil by finding commonalities in humanity. By guiding students to seek solutions to conflicts, they become better peacemakers and peacekeepers. If we can flip classrooms, let’s get kids to flip the news to look for positive ways to present current events.
The following video was created by Oded LevRan as a project in visual communication studies at Holon Institute of Technology. It’s called Chickpeace. It presents the main principles of Peace Journalism using hummus as an analogy to reality that this is a staple dish for both Israelis and Palestinians.
Depending on grade level, students could take a topic, event, or place and present it as a way to build common ground. Aiding students in this type of endeavor teaches them the art of framing a topic around a positive approach to the world around them. Using reframing techniques, they can take an existing report and come up with a way to down play the hostility to foster a greater understanding. As always, teaching students to deconstruct messages, call out biases, or highlight sensationalized reporting builds stronger media and news literacy skills.
Yesterday, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) released the 2014 Global Peace Index (GPI) on its Vision of Humanity website. The goal of this interactive site is to bring peace research to life with interactive maps, reports, and the latest media pertaining to it. As with our earlier posts on the topic of peace, and in particular the release of the 2013 GPI, it is important that we continually share these findings with our learners.
We see the excitement surrounding the 2014 FIFA World Cup tournament daily with kids and adults. It is no wonder the current IEP used this public attention to release the latest GPI report with the banner "Peace World Cup."
Peace is not always easy to define, but perhaps simply put, it is the absence of war or conflict. That is at least the most tangible definition for our learners to grasp, but it is much more. If we live in harmony with the world around us, we think of it as “positive peace;” yet countries that achieve a state of peace because they are not involved in conflicts either external or internal can be in a period of “negative peace.” In other words, the level of peacefulness is not necessarily in harmony with the discord felt among citizens.
The map below shows how 162 countries around the world rank according to their peacefulness based on the 2014 GPI. There is also a concise PDF download of the report with colorful visuals, charts, and statistical information. Both of theses resources will be helpful to teachers in designing lessons to use with students.
The video for the Global Peace Index 2014 summarizes the state of peace around the world over the last seven years, and it is well worth the few short minutes to watch and discuss with students. It brings together the research to show how the GPI, the Cost of Violence Containment, and the Pillars of Peace are all connected.
We want our students to be those “pillars of peace” who take a vested interest in attitudes, structures, and institutions that underpin a peaceful world. With over 200 million people living below the poverty line and over 9 trillion dollars a year spent on containing violence, it’s more important than ever to help our young learners see peace as the most fundamental human right of all people.
Although the exhibit no longer travels, its website is a treasure trove of resources for educators, and it does not shy away from addressing the topic head-on. "Race" seeks to explain the differences among people to reveal the “reality – unreality – of race.” It looks at it through three lenses: history, human variation, and lived experiences.
The interactive timeline of the history of race in the United States streams color-coded articles according to government, science, and society. Each opens to a detailed account for that event with related primary sources, links to other information, and a glossary of terms for that particular article.
There are six components on the Human Variation page, prefaced with this quotation by biological anthropologist Janis Hutchinson: “When you begin to understand the biology of human variation, you have to ask yourself if race is a good way to describe that.”
Perhaps the most powerful page for opening the conversation about race with kids is the section on Lived Experience, with a poignant statement by historian Robin D.G. Kelley: “[Racism] is not about how you look, it is about how people assign meaning to how you look.”
The learning extensions in this section reflect a cultural point of view. Kids will get it. Two in particular are the Sports Quiz that tests the knowledge of facts and stereotypes, and the video segments exploring the standards of beauty imposed on today’s black girls on A Girl Like Me.
We stand firmly in our commitment to lead the discussion regarding race as well as bias, diversity, and inclusion with our kids. The more open the conversation, the more likely we can help dispel associations with racial implications. It’s all about giving voice to the tough questions and concerns of our learners to serve the greater good.
February is African American History Month. We celebrate the amazing men and women who contributed to the cultural fabric of the United States. It’s a time to reflect on their struggles, accomplishments, and contributions. As teachers, we make every effort to weave the importance of this into our curricula regardless of discipline. Yet, as educators, do we get to the heart of the matter and talk about race? Isn’t African American History Month as much about race, as it is about heritage? We think so.
Michael I. Norton and Evan P. Apfelbaum published The Costs Of Color Blindness in the Harvard Business Review last year. The companion video to this article offers a detailed insight into this research. It invites the viewer to participate in an activity to illustrate the reluctance to identify individuals by race. The study found, with the exception of young children, most people are uncomfortable with making a direct reference to race.
Interestingly, when color is reduced to black and white dots for each image, the responses changed. Participants had little trouble with using a dot to identify color, as opposed to identifying race based on black and white faces.
This inherent reluctance indicates a greater social dynamic surrounding the issue of race. Instead of avoiding the topic, we should openly acknowledge it. The more we integrate this into the conversation, the easier it is to discuss it without racial implications. We need to take the lead. This video resource is a good place to start. It could be used with middle or high school students, at a faculty meeting, or as a professional development workshop.
We need to be more straightforward and candid in our approach to educating our learners and talking about race and social attitudes. Especially when high profile cases such as the George Zimmerman shooting of Trayvon Martin, and the more recent shooting of Jordan Davis by Michael Dunn over loud music, have racial overtones based on biases and stereotypes.
We want our learners to be a nation that believes individuals should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. To do that, we need to be open and frank in our discussions about race.
Implicit bias lies in us, like it or not. We all have thoughts and feelings that occur outside of our conscious awareness or control. Raising awareness about it is where education comes into it. There are many resources available to delve deeper into implicit social cognition.
In our world of everyday activity here in the United States, we are protected from the more violent outbursts that occur around the world. We have our share of atrocities such as the massacre at Newtown, Connecticut, but compared to the levels of protests, violence, and deaths in other places, we are fairly removed from the day-to-day death and destruction facing civilians in countries such as Syria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.
Our push to talk to our students about peace-building, peace-making, and peace-keeping is ongoing, and we have written about it here, here, and here. The world has definitely changed since our first post about visualizing the effects of peace in 2011. Perhaps it is why we think it is so important to annually share the Global Peace Index (GPI) with our students. Sadly, the 2013 GPI is not as optimistic as it was for 2012, and there's been a gradual decline in the peace index over the past several years.
We know that we are winding down at the end of the school year, but perhaps we could encourage our students one last time to look at the GPI interactive map and watch the video highlighting the latest results. It's worth having an open discussion with our students to encourage them to be the forces of change for a more peaceful world. The interactive map and short video are well worth the time. They need to know it's not just a disruption to society, but also an enormous strain on the global economy. It's important to help students understand the financial impact behind the rise in violence.
According to the 2013 Global Peace Index, the world is a less peaceful place in part due to the sharp rise in the number of homicides. Take a minute to watch the following video, which highlights the most recent findings, with students. It's worth it.
We want our students to build "Pillars Of Peace" to push for change that promotes a more harmonious world. It needs to be long-lasting, but to do so it must be front and center.
"For humanity to prosper in a resource constraint world, a paradigm shift
in managing international affairs is required to curtail global warfare."
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