Through a grant funded by Mass Humanities, we were thrilled to offer opportunities for our students and island community to engage in real-time, face-to-face discussions with peers and adults around the world. 

Our project challenged assumptions, built empathy and broadened cultural awareness. We confronted the ways cultural literacy is mediated to our students. Much of what students learn is through a secondary lens, either through textbooks, or through an otherwise edited and/or editorialized media. We wanted our students to have meaningful face-to-face discussions with peers and adults in other countries and communities. Many of our students have never had such an experience.

Over 4 weeks, through our partnership with Andover (MA) Public Schools and Shared_Studios, a Portal was installed in the MVRHS Library.

• Global Week 1: October 7th – 10th
• Global Weeks 2 & 3: November 12th – 22nd
• Global Week 4: December 9th – 13th

Portal Sites and Connections

We connected on multiple occasions with friends in locations around the world.  The number in parenthesis is the number of two-hour connections we had with each location.

• Herat, Afghanistan Arts & Culture Hub (7)
• Kigali, Rwanda Impact Hub, Downtown Kigali (5)
• Gaza City Technology Education Center (4)
• Mexico City, Mexico Chapultepec Park (Public Park) (4)
• Erbil, Iraq Refugee Camp (3)
• Lagos, Nigeria Freedom Park (Public Park) (2)
• Lesbos, Greece Refugee Training Center on Lesbos Island (1)
• La Paz, Bolivia Universidad Católica Boliviana (1)
• Nakivale, Uganda Nakivale Refugee Settlement (1)
• El Progreso, Honduras Organization for Youth Empowerment (1)
• Berlin, Germany S27 (art lab for young people) (2)
• Doha Debates Global Conversations on Urgent Issues (1)
• Hardy County, WV East Hardy High School (1)
• Bonton Farms, Dallas, TX Urban Farm (2)
• Milwaukee, WI Amani Neighborhood (highest rate of male black incarceration in America) (1)

See the full schedule and attendance here.

What are Portals?

Portals are a “global public art initiative”.  They are live, full-body audiovisual environments hosted by communities around the world that enable face-to-face dialogues between people who will likely not otherwise meet. Inside, students converse with someone in a distant Portal as if in the same room. Participants can make eye contact and talk in real-time. Many have described feeling like they were “breathing the same air.”  Shared_Studios has a network of 40+ sites around the world, each with a local curator who can connect extraordinary and every-day people to meet with and talk to our students.

Social Studies teacher JoEllen Meuse describes the experience

Numbers

What is “Home”? Immigration and the Refugee Experience

Our “Cross-Cultural Perceptions vs. Reality” project aimed to broaden cultural awareness and impart a greater sense of humanity and empathy as a result of conversations about immigration, the refugee experience, and the meaning of “home”. Twenty-eight Humanities, Arts, World Language, and English Language Learner classes engaged in in-depth cultural studies before and after conversations through teleconferencing with peers and adults in locations around the world.

Students considered questions such as: “How transparent is the lens through which we see other cultures?” “What biases and assumptions are embedded in the way we learn about them?”

Lessons in the Humanities classes, taught by Corinne Kurtz and Rachel Schubert, centered on questions such as: What comes first, our beliefs or our identity? How does what we believe shape who we are and how we live? Where do our beliefs come from? What do disparate belief systems have in common? What aspects of our identities are fixed and what are mutable? How has the concept of identity and the self changed over time? What is the relationship between what you believe and who you are?

We used storytelling as a vehicle to explore these questions and others. Much of the preparation and result of class projects revolved around both the telling of stories and active listening.

Some classes focused on stories in our cultural imagination and how they are applied to our personal narratives.  For example, Christine Ferrone’s AP English class brought questions raised by their reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:

No matter their identity, students are asked to grapple with their own roles and responsibilities. Through talking to others who look and speak differently but share many of the same core values (or don’t), students confronted themselves with broadened perspectives.

Amar Bakshi, the founder of Shared_Studios, aptly described the need for this interaction:

“There are powerful forces driving us deeper into our own communities including widening income inequality, a consolidating mass media, and dwindling public spaces […] These conversations help us better understand ourselves. It breaks us out of habituated ways of thinking and enables us to see a greater range of possibility for ourselves. And […] these types of dialogue create the values and narratives of our broader community. When people speak to one another without hope of gain or fear of judgment, but to convey their own truth, authentically, and to listen to someone else do the same, they create their own, unique meaning together, laying the groundwork for our shared societies.”

Our students explored how the implicit social contract is renegotiated as our communities become more diverse and more fractured.  They met Lewis, who started a youth program in the Amani neighborhood of Milwaukee, which has the highest rate of male black incarceration in the United States.  He spoke of the challenges facing black young adults. Our students met some of them.

What happens as ‘they’ become ‘us’? What is our responsibility?

As with around the country, our island has been grappling with issues related to immigration. The prospect of DACA ending has affected many in our community. Martha’s Vineyard is home to a significant population of Brazilian and Eastern European born residents whose children attend MVRHS.

This project is related to other immigration-focused efforts at MVRHS, including a photo exhibit of foreign-born islanders, a Model UN course, and ongoing meetings amongst 23 MVRHS teachers with Lynn Ditchfield to develop Borders to Bridges, an arts-based immigration curriculum.  One of the lessons featured in the book (The Meaning of “Home” Through Videoconferencing) was developed as part of this project.

Students discussed how immigration has shaped their communities and what can be done to create a more welcoming and tolerant culture.

Students explaining what it’s like to live on Martha’s Vineyard to Olamide in Lagos, Nigeria

Freedom and Opportunity, or the Lack of Either

The 11th-grade Humanities students discussed the refugee experience and the meaning of “home” with refugees and others in Portals in Erbil, Herat, Mexico City, El Progreso, Hondorus, and La Paz, Bolivia. Students found that, like themselves, their lives are filled with transitions, setbacks, and renewals. They shared common interests in music and fashion.  But in many ways their lives were different.  Some were unable to leave.

At the time of one of our connections with La Paz, Bolivia was in turmoil over the ouster of their president who in recent days fled in exile to Mexico.  La Paz was under a blockade.  The university students related what it was like to worry about their food supply and whether or not to join protests.  Our students asked them where they were from, if they could go home, and if they wanted to.

Rami and friends in Erbil, Iraq

We worried one day when we were unable to connect with Erbil.  The curator, Rami, was usually responsive but he was unavailable.  For over a day we had no news about him.  We were relieved he was there for our next planned connection a few days later.   He said on that day, he got on the bus from the refugee camp in Erbil to Mosul, his hometown, which had been largely destroyed by ISIL in 2014, but now is where the University of Mosul is located and where he attends classes.   The bus ride usually takes about an hour, but on this occasion, the bus was stopped by a militia group.  They thought they recognized Rami as a member of ISIL, so he was put in detention without any means of contacting his friends or family.  It was only because he knew a mutual person that they allowed him back home 12 hours later.

Our friends in Gaza, led by Mira, their curator, also talked about what it was like to not be able to leave.

Students share what it was like talking to people in Gaza City

We had an extraordinary opportunity to share a meal with the Lesbos, Greece Portal.  We met aid workers, filmmakers, photographers, and professionals from around the world who work with refugees to help them learn employable skills as they entered Europe.  Of the ten or so people that we ate with, no one was from the same country.

There is no substitute for understanding what life is like than hearing these stories directly from those involved.

English Language Learners

Speaking, listening and writing are the three domains of the ELL curriculum.  Part of the process of learning English and American culture, through North American Pronunciation course and the US Cultures course, is to tell their stories, either through speaking, writing, art, (animation, cartooning, etc.) Each fall, students create storytelling projects for class projects. The Portal gave them opportunities to share and listen to stories in English with people in places such as Herat.  Saied, the Herat Portal curator, reflected on the joy of being part of an exchange between a group of Afghani men and a group of our Brazilian ELL students.  “Our cultures are similar in the way we talk and share stories,” he said.

Students talking to Ciela in Mexico City

Teacher Prep and Professional Development

The in-house work amongst our faculty team at MVRHS benefitted from the advice and consultation of Tabi Haller-Jorden and Lynn Ditchfield. One result was a Portal Prep guide that includes resources, questions, and ideas for lessons.

Lynn has been developing Borders to Bridges, a separate but interconnected grant-funded project, to develop a creativity-based curriculum on issues related to immigration and the refugee experience. Lynn encouraged and guided teachers as they planned lessons involving the Portal.

We had six calls with Tabi, an hour apiece, that included many of the teachers on our team. We discussed strategies to prepare students for the portal, including interviewing skills, and ways to elicit storytelling from both sides. We also discussed how to build and gauge empathy. Her support and guidance were invaluable. We hope to continue working with Tabi as we develop our global education curriculum.

We also benefited from the experience and generous guidance of Steve Chinosi at Andover Public Schools. Steve has been the driving force behind an emerging network of New England schools that share traveling, portable Portals headquartered in Andover. We met with a team of regional educators, including from Ipswich, Lawrence, Newton, Littleton, and Hampton, NH over the summer to share ideas and develop the network. Steve helped brainstorm ideas, shared resources, and gave invaluable technical advice as we learned how to setup and build a variety of iterations of the Portal, including two separate inflatable versions and another housed in a small room at MVRHS.

Partners

We are very grateful for the assistance of Mass Humanities and the Rotary Club of Martha’s Vineyard. The project wouldn’t have been possible without the support and enthusiasm of both. Thank you!

The Future

The Parlour (iEARN) is a new project that has sprung out of our work with the Portal.  Led by Chris Baer, it connects students in a growing list of schools around the world through real-time videoconferencing.  The Parlour connects groups of student to each other.  Teachers help students prepare for the Parlour and then step away as they talk to each other. Throughout the fall we connected with students in schools in Gurgaon, India; Mufulira, Zambia, Chiapas, Mexico, and San Antonio de Padua, Argentina.

We look forward to using our newly-built Portal room for future Portal connections.  Much of this is dependant upon the ability of our new network of New England educators working with Shared_Studios to develop a sustainable model for ongoing subscriptions.  We are very optimistic!

Resources

Examples of student activities

Role Play Activity

Lynn Ditchfield, one of our project scholars, has led the development of Borders to Bridges: a Creativity-Based Curriculum Guidebook on Immigration that includes 35 lesson plans that may be adapted across subjects. An example:

Students experience empathy and understanding of people who leave their countries fleeing from poverty, violence, war or other kinds of traumatic situations.

In preparation, students begin by a writing activity, answering pre-activity questions:

1. When I think of immigration, I think…
2. When I think about the connection between my life and the topic of immigration, I think …
3. One thing I wish I knew about immigration is…

After spending 20 minutes in the Portal, students would spend another 20 minutes writing a reflection. At the next class meeting they will tell a story about the person they talked to in the Portal, either in first or third person. The presentation could include poetry, artwork or music to help convey the experience.

Post-Activity Questions:

1. Before, when I thought of immigration, I thought…….but now, I think….
2. When I think about the connection between my life and this unit, I think…
3. One thing I wish other people knew about immigration is…

Narrative4

Narrative4 is a model that has great potential for adaptation. It is a global empathy building project that is based on story exchange. Students pair and share stories, then retell one another’s story and reflect on how the experience changed their perspective. Narrative4 has partnered with Shared_Studios to connect schools through Portals in Mexico, the Bronx, and Kentucky using their model. A majority of students report greater empathy and a greater willingness toward action following the experience.

Art Exchange Project

Students create portraits or other representations of people they’ve met in the portals and then send the portraits to them. This follows a model developed by The Memory Project , where “young artists around the world to create portraits as special gifts for children facing challenges”.

Captioned Imagery Exchange Projects: “One Day in the Life”, “Alternate Reality”, “Video Postcards”

Students exchange captioned imagery of daily life in their community with their international partners through a variety of projects and levels. Afterwards, students meet their partners in the Portal to discuss them “in person”.

• In “One Day in the Life”, students trade captioned digital photographs of daily life through a number of specific themes (mealtime, dress, transportation, school, family, etc.) with cell phones and cameras.
• In “Alternate Reality”, students trade captioned composites of their partners (photographed against a plain backdrop), realistically superimposed into a photo made in their school or community, illustrating what their life might look like if they lived in their partners’ community.
• In “Video postcards”, students exchange short (<4 minutes), low-res, talking-head videos, introducing themselves, discussing a pre-arranged topic, or reviewing collaborative work (above).

Meaning of ‘home’ lesson

 

Personnel:

Kevin McGrath, MVRHS Librarian, oversaw the project and worked with scholars, teachers, and students on designing, moderating, and documenting the discussion sessions.

Lynn Ditchfield, C.A.G.S., Ed.M., M.A., workshop facilitator, teacher trainer, and adjunct professor at Fitchburg State University, led faculty in curriculum design. Ms. Ditchfield has designed a creativity-based immigration curriculum called Borders to Bridges.

Tabi Haller-Jorden advised on teaching students interviewing and storytelling skills. Ms. Haller-Jorden is a global consultant on social justice and workplace innovation and an advisory board member of Capacity, an incubator for persons with refugee and migrant background in Zurich. In 2018, she led 50 MVRHS students in a transformative one-day workshop on storytelling and the future of work.

Chris Baer, Art, Technology and Design teacher and department chair, coordinates connections with schools in existing Portal locations and other international schools, including Yemen, Myanmar, Argentina, and Mexico.

Stefano Chinosi, Director of Strategic Innovation, Andover Public Schools, assisted in the implementation and curation of the Portal. Andover Public Schools provided Portal training, shared their global citizenship curriculum, and helped facilitate student workshops.

Emma Saperstein, Global Portal Curator at Shared_Studios, works with curators in various locations to develop Portal programming that caters to the interests and needs of both connecting Portal sites.

Teachers

The following teachers integrated the Portal with lessons and visited with their students.  See the full schedule and attendance here.

Chris Baer, Art & Technology
Galen Brown, English
Laura DeBettencourt, Special Education
Justine DeOliveira, World Languages
Leigh Fairchild, Social Studies
Christine Ferrone, English & Senior Capstone
Olsen Houghton, Social Studies
James Jennings, English
Corinne Kurtz, Social Studies
Kevin McGrath, Senior Capstone
JoEllen Meuse, Social Studies
Diane Norton, English Language Learners
Brian Roesler, Social Studies
Rachel Schubert, Social Studies
Ena Thulin, Social Studies
Cindy West, World Languages

Project made possible by Mass Humanities, the Mass Cultural Council, and the Rotary Club of Martha’s Vineyard