A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my students who were failing remote learning. In the end, as I approach my grading deadline, only six students will fail. That seems like a success relative to the 22 who were in danger of failing two weeks ago, particularly since I saw four of the six only once or twice the whole term. But rather than focusing on failing, I’d like to highlight some of the successes – some of the most impressive final projects I’ve seen over my four years teaching on Chicago’s southwest side. Although remote learning has been a struggle, in the end, most students demonstrated powerful learning remotely on a variety of important topics that I’m going to highlight below.
Global Politics
Global Politics is an International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme course with a wide scope and a lot left up to individual teachers of the subject. As a core internal assessment, students complete a political engagement activity, a service learning-oriented project, focused on learning about a political issue through secondary source research, interviews, and taking action. Students then analyze their learning and synthesize the variety of experiences they had. Students can focus on just about anything, although I recommend they focus on something with a local dimension. A few of the many interesting topics they focused on follows:
- Disputed legitimacy of public health experts and COVID-19 vaccination rates in Chicago
- Identifying the global context of the issue, this student argued: “Public health experts were, and still are, criticized for the legitimacy of their claims… [and their] legitimacy has been challenged not only by common people, but also by leaders such as former President Trump in the US, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Nehandra Modi in India, and Boris Johnson in the UK.”
- Student human rights in relation to mental health in Chicago Public Schools
- This student argued, “The lack of mental health resources for students is violating their human rights since they’re unable to get the right amount of care and attention that they need.”
- Land development in the Back of the Yards neighborhood of Chicago and gentrification
- This student argued, “gentrification will not be a major problem with this new development [in Back of the Yards] since it’s creating a lot of opportunities, programs, and get-away space for the people of the neighborhood.”
- The rights of people who are undocumented in Illinois in relation to the pandemic response
- This student concluded, “Through my research, I’ve learned about many helpful resources undocumented individuals could reach out to, and I was able to share that information with my family, and am now able to help my community as well.”
Ethnic Studies
Global Politics is a Junior/Senior single-term elective, and students take History of Chicago the other term. This group of students was taught largely by a student-teacher over the second term, so I missed the opportunity to develop really strong relationships with many of the students, but they produced some of the best videos I’ve seen from students. For their final project, students picked a topic of interest related to course content, completed research through a variety of primary and secondary sources, analyzed their research, and then represented in a creative format. A few of the topics and their conclusions follow:
- Representation of people of color in media
- After a thorough analysis of the portrayal of people of color in Phineas and Ferb and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the student concluded: “Representation matters… It feels nice to see yourself represented on the screen”
- Palestinian-American activism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- An English language learner identified some of the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the emergence of Palestinian-American activism after the most recent round of violence in Gaza, and concluded, “so I think in a short time, it cannot be solved.”
- Discrimination against people of color in hiring practices
- After outlining some of the research on how people of color are discriminated against in hiring practices, a student concluded, “Everyone should be given a chance, and they shouldn’t be declined just because of their skin color. It’s never right, it never will be.”
To conclude…
In short, despite the massive challenges students have faced this year in remote learning, a lot of deep and insightful learning has happened, and I am proud to have facilitated this process.