Hello all!
We can’t believe it has been almost 3 years since we were
live with this blog! So much has
happened in that time with the Virtual Information Project. Here’s a recap:
Our first Fund for Teachers fellowship in 2010 (Virtual
Information Project – VIP I), allowed us to build a partnership with a sister
school in Nairobi, Kenya (Kilimani Integrated Primary School) which also
operates within an inclusive model like the Dr. William W. Henderson Inclusion
School. FFT funds provided wifi and one laptop computer, a digital photo and
video camera, and technology training for a teacher at the school. Throughout
the following school year, our students were able to communicate virtually with
the students at our sister school and build penpal relationships. FFT also
sponsored an educational safari and our students were able to use the
information we collected through interviews and photographs to create digital
animal adaptation books that they shared with their penpals.
The following year, our colleagues (JoAnn and Ellen)
received a FFT grant (VIP II – The Legacy) to grow the work we began. We
accompanied them to Kenya on our own dime, and together we worked with teachers
and students to build our partnership by creating photo journals; parents from
our school donated laptop computers and we were able to build a fully
functioning computer lab with 12 computers for student use; families from our
school donated hundreds of books to build a small library at the school; and
FFT funded wifi for yet another year for our partner school to continue our
virtual exchange. We also traveled to the Selekay conservancy and stayed near a
Maasai village, learning about Maasai ways of life and local wildlife to
enhance our Science study from Kindergarten through 5th grade via
our Science specialist. Our principal, valuing the work we began, allowed us to
loop with our students and they were able to sustain and grow their penpal
relationships (with greater access to technology) over a second year.
Furthermore, a Kenyan teacher from the Kilimani School (Mary Maragia) was
awarded a fellowship to study at the Perkins’ School for the Blind. She studied
and volunteered throughout the subsequent school year at our school. Our
students wrote and published books about Maasai culture and did a comparative
study between the Maasai of East Africa and the Native Americans of North
America.
In the next year, not able to travel to Kenya, we continued
our relationship with our partner school, virtually connecting through
blogging. Our students had the pleasure of meeting & learning from Judith
Baker, founder of the African Storybook Project and former BPS teacher. Judith
traveled to our sister-school in Kenya and brought letters and small artifacts
from our students to their penpals, and included our sister school as a site
for the African Storybook Project. Writer Jeremy O’Kasick returned to the
States from a 6-month stint with the Maasai people in Loliondo, Tanzania
recording proverbs and folktales. He visited and shared his work with our
students. They in turn wrote versions of fables and parables, based on Maasai
lessons, utilizing photographs from our FFT fellowship and drawing their own
illustrations.
This brings us to the present and we are off to East Africa
again for “VIP III – The
Expansion”!
This year, there have been changes in administration and
staffing at the Kilimani Integrated Primary School. The new administration is excited about the future of our
schools partnering together. Since
2010, we have dreamt of bringing our students to Kenya to meet their penpals,
but have run into some difficulty organizing with BPS International Programs
because of the age of our students.
Now that the Henderson Inclusion School is transitioning to a K-12
school and our sister school is already a K-8, it will be possible to begin
penpal relationships at the fifth grade level and nurture them until students
are in 8th grade. Then we can organize an international excursion to
Kenya, based on the work students have done over the course of four consecutive
school years. Also, building this breadth of continuous experience with the
students will allow us to begin our fundraising and preparation efforts early.
It will also be a wonderfully unique opportunity to add to our innovative
inclusive school and be something to distinguish the upper school – virtually
and physically connecting students with and without disabilities in inclusive
schools across continents and cultures.
So, we are off to Nairobi, Kenya again to visit our sister school and identify
a pilot group of students and teachers to join us in this venture.
From Nairobi, we will travel to Arusha, Tanzania to
reconnect with Jeremy O’Kasick. Jeremy is currently working with Honeyguide
Foundation. Honeyguide is an ecotourism company striving to bridge the gap
between the tourism industry and local communities. Their aim is to “develop long term, positive strategic links
between communities and their business partners, providing mechanisms that
contribute positively to community sustainability, poverty reduction, and
providing a catalyst for the communities to have a positive influence on their
surrounding natural resources.“
We will travel with Jeremy to local communities around
Arusha and learn about the sustainable efforts being made between the Maasai
people, as well as other people groups, and the tourism industry to try and
conserve and grow their natural resources. Furthermore, our plan is to visit schools in the region
where Honeyguide is developing education and conservation projects in
partnership with Jane Goodall’s Roots and Shoots program and Tanzania People
and Wildlife. We have developed an
interdisciplinary Science and Reading unit of study comparing humans and
chimpanzees based on our 2010 visit to Jane Goodall’s Sweetwaters Chimpanzee
Sanctuary in Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. We are excited to build upon this as we learn more about
Roots and Shoots’ work in Tanzania.
In the past three school years since our first FFT
fellowship, our student achievement in Science has skyrocketed, with an over
40% point increase in average 5th grade MCAS scores. We firmly
believe one of the chief contributors to this success is the way our Science
instruction has been revolutionized as a result of the FFT fellowships. At the fifth
grade level, we were trained this past fall in the new fifth grade STEM aligned
Science program-COSEE Ocean. The
aim of this curriculum is to provide high quality, engaging Ocean Science
curriculum to a diverse audience of students in urban school districts. Students explore ocean features,
differing ocean biomes and ecosystems, and how humans and nature are
interconnected through the ocean. This unit charges us to challenge student
thinking around sustainability and making smarter ecological choices. The overall unit question asks, “How
are humans and nature interconnected?”
We will travel to Zanzibar off the coast of mainland
Tanzania to visit the Institute of Marine Sciences. The IMS is one of four of the world’s Coral Reef Targeted
Research & Capacity Building for Management Program Centres of
Excellence. The aim of these Centres
of Excellence is to “build scientific capacity and research to inform policy,
so that coral reef systems under threat from climate change and multiple human
stressors can be sustained for current and future generations.” We will explore through a combination
of snorkeling and boating excursions the coral reefs, mangrove forests,
seagrass beds, estuaries, and beaches where five of the world’s seven marine
turtle species nest (all of which are considered endangered). We will learn first hand from
researchers how marine toxins are damaging organisms higher up in the food
chain, how agriculture, mining, and dynamite fishing are destroying coral
reefs, and how sand-mining, erosion, and tourism are destroying turtle nesting
habitat.
By first-hand exposure to the work that Honeyguide is doing
with local communities in and around Arusha, as well as by visiting and
learning about the work scientists are doing in Zanzibar, we will be better
equipped to teach the COSEE Ocean unit more effectively. Experiencing this,
documenting it, and sharing it with students will be extremely vital in helping
us address our overarching unit question: “How are humans and nature
interconnected?” We hope to in turn expose our students to ways in which we in
the first world can make responsible decisions that impact those in the third
world positively. As a result of
this fellowship, we as teachers will better understand how the earth and all its
inhabitants are deeply interconnected and will be able to share this knowledge
meaningfully with our students.
We can’t wait for this work to begin! We look forward to having you journey
along with us through this blog as we embark on another life-changing FFT
adventure!
All the best,
Danielle &
Terri
Enjoy these photos of our students writing their Maasai fables and parables:
