Twin Rivers Education Centre
Visual Storytelling
A SET-BC Synergy Project
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For descriptions of the files, please see the "Resources" tab.
I have a student with a long and deep history of trauma. Their schooling has been highly disrupted and they are a very complex learner. This is the type of student that I designed this project for. This student struggled to complete any task and longed for a connection to their culture. The student took part in a traditional drum-making workshop that our Aboriginal Education Worker facilitated at our school. I saw an opportunity and I took full advantage! I suggested that my student teach me about the process, but since I couldn’t attend the workshop, they could make a video or take some pictures and make a little presentation. They are working well below grade level and have significant difficulties with writing. The student was not willing to be on camera or even to use their recorded voice, but they were willing to teach me with a little slideshow. They gathered some pictures and carefully planned out how to word the steps of the process. Because of the student’s significant struggles with writing, we started the process using a GoPro to record some brainstorming sessions. The student used the GoPro to record audio of our conversations and brainstorming sessions. Once the student had chosen the wording they wanted on the slideshow, they played back the audio while they independently typed up their slides. This was a very big accomplishment for this student. The small slideshow represents over a month’s worth of painstaking work by the student. It represents many edits and many revisions. The student was incredibly proud of their work and was delighted that I chose to share it in my blog. See the pdf of the finished slideshow below.
I thought long and hard about which student video I wanted to showcase. I settled on this student's video not because it was the "best" video, but because this student and their project was the best representation of the idea behind the project.
Raine has been my student for more than 2 years now, but Raine and I first met before he transitioned. Before transitioning, Raine was in crisis. When we met again, Raine had recently come out and had started to identify as male. Raine was still a long way from where he is today and he spent nearly 2 years in my class without completing a single course. Raine jumped from course to course, making very little progress in each one before giving up and trying something else. Raine is a very creative person, but struggles to complete written work. When I first introduced Raine to the idea of making a video, he was adamantly against it. He wanted to finish his course "the right way" and didn't think he'd be good at it. A few months later, Raine started testosterone therapy and started watching transition videos from other transgender people. Raine was telling me about the videos one day in class and I suggested that he could make his own video and that it would count for his English course. He was hesitant, but decided to give it a try. Raine failed to finish the video by the end of the 2019/2020 school year and I thought he was going to give up for good. When Raine came back in September, he excitedly told me that he had worked on it over the summer and was almost ready to start filming. Weeks went by and Raine started over more times than I could keep track of. Finally, he decided to do a test recording and within a matter of a couple of weeks he had completed his first unit of work in more than 2 years! The successful completion of this project filled Raine with confidence and he quickly finished his English course. This was the first academic course that Raine had completed in 2 years! Raine has since completed several courses and is hoping to graduate next year. Here is Raine's transition video: https://youtu.be/cxLNu3r4pQw I finally felt like I was hitting my stride after returning from winter break. Students were starting to embrace tech and creativity was starting to return. Talk of vaccines and longer days were starting to ease the stress. I had more students than ever choosing to try visual storytelling for their assignments and my excitement for teaching was returning. Spring felt like it was just around the corner! Then, as my family was enjoying one of our last ski days of the year on Family day, I was taken out by a chairlift accident caused by the skier behind us. I broke my wrist and ended up being off work for nearly a month.
My TOC did their best to fill in for a unique and complex position with challenging students that are highly resistant to change. Things did not go smoothly. When I returned, most of the students had abandoned their digital projects and had chosen more traditional projects instead. Some had switched classes completely and others had finished their course. Months of work were lost and I was left starting over with a new group of students. It feels like I’ve spent the year ducking, dodging, and getting knocked out, but staff and students are always there to lift me up and encourage me to try again. Spring is here and the changing weather is opening up new opportunities to get outside and explore. This project will get back on track! This year is TOUGH! I am doing a combination of in class and hybrid learning and it is feeling like an impossible task. I feel like I’m failing at both. My students are disconnected and overwhelmed. They are closed off and have limited capacity for learning. Creativity seems to have disappeared as students try to manage their stress and they are asking for *GASP* worksheets instead!!! They want to be left alone to read textbooks and answer worksheet questions, and I am not sure how to enjoy my job like this.
In a normal year, I take full advantage of my unique teaching position where I work one on one with students who are completing a variety of self paced courses. I have the time and space to engage in rich discussions with students about topics they are passionate about. I get to help my students create projects that allow them to demonstrate their understanding of the curriculum in a way that is unique to them. These are parts of my job that I enjoy most and I feel like the pandemic has robbed me of them. It has replaced engaging discussions with masks that seem to stifle conversation. Unique project based learning opportunities have been replaced with mind numbing worksheets and sanitization routines. It has all left me feeling tired, stressed, and burnt out. As we trudge through the fog of this seemingly endless year, I occasionally see a glimmer of light. A student decides to give tech a try after struggling to get their thoughts on paper. They dip their toe into the project. Some recoil and back away, but once in a while, a student will decide to stay a while and see how things go. One such student has been trying to complete their English Language Arts 10 credits with me on and off for well over a year. They had made very little progress and they were reluctant to try a project involving tech. I persisted and they eventually embraced the project and produced a video they were proud of. The student chose to tell the story of their transition from the gender they were born with to the gender that matches the person they are on the inside. The video ended up being more than just a school project. It was educational, personal, and empowering. It was the first time that the student had felt truly successful in an academic course and it spurred an increase in productivity that allowed the student to complete a course. A win like that really helps to overcome the stress and fatigue of a very difficult year. We are back, but not back to normal. Half my day feels like it is taken up by sanitising everything in sight, my hands are raw from washing and sanitising, and my classes are eerily quiet. Group work is no more and everyone is staying seated more than ever before. My teaching practice needs to change and I am so thankful for the technology I have available through my SET-BC Synergy project!
This year, I’ve needed to be more flexible than ever before as we adapt to the ever changing landscape. My project has evolved somewhat because of Covid, but it is gaining popularity and is allowing students to really show me what they can do. It often takes some convincing to get my students to buy in, but it’s incredible to see what they can create once they dive in. A student that witnessed domestic abuse made a powerful video telling a fictionalised story of a woman overcoming abuse and finding her strength. The student did a photo shoot where she did her own makeup to look like she had been badly beaten and to look like it was healing. She took chilling self portraits and set them to music. She added statistics about domestic abuse and narrated the fictionalised story of finding her strength. It created a powerful visual to add to the impact of her story. Sadly, because of her history, I cannot share her powerful video. I am thankful to have survived the toughest, most disrupted year of my teaching career! This year I survived…
Next year will be better… What a wacky spring! This year, I decided that I would focus on embracing technology and start incorporating it into my daily teaching practice. In the beginning, I mostly did it to reduce paper waste and to facilitate providing work for students that are home sick, on vacation, or serving suspensions offsite. When I made that goal, I had no idea how much that choice would change my teaching practice or how instrumental that decision would be to my survival this year.
In September, I started my journey by creating Google Classrooms for each of the 17 courses I sometimes teach. It was a huge undertaking, but I was making good progress by October and I felt ready for a new challenge. In October, I attended a Pro-D workshop about Universally Designed Learning and the presenter talked about the Set-BC synergy project. I spent the weekend dreaming up a project that could help me achieve my UDL goals within the scope of the Synergy project. I fell in love with my visual storytelling project and I got to work on my application as soon as I got back to school. I had an eager group of learners and we were excited to take on this project and all the learning together. Our technology finally showed up just before spring break and we were all excited to jump in after we got back. Unfortunately, Covid-19 had different plans and schools were shut down before anyone had the chance to film even a single shot. Our project was put on hold indefinitely. While my visual storytelling project was put on hold, I shifted my focus back to my Google Classroom project. By the mid-March school shut down I had completed all but 3 of my 17 Google Classrooms. We were given a week to prep and contact families. I had digital versions of almost all of my teaching materials and I knew how to navigate the Google suite of products. I still had 3 Google Classrooms to finish for the courses I was teaching at the time, but I was miles ahead of my colleagues. All did not go smoothly, but I at least had time to breathe. Now to figure out how to teach students that don’t wake up until after my workday is done. All suggestions are welcome! Welcome to our Blog! Twin Rivers Education Centre (TREC) is an alternate high school program for students that struggle in our regular school system. Our school offers students self-paced learning opportunities with support from teachers, support staff, counsellors, and outside agencies. Our programs are flexible and teachers often work collaboratively to best meet the unique needs of our students. Many of our students struggle to engage in their learning because of factors including large gaps in their learning, a history of trauma, mental health issues, and learning disabilities. The goal of our project is to allow all students access to technology that will enable them to demonstrate their learning in new ways. Many of our students have difficulty with written output that results in frustration and avoidance of school work. This project will give students the option to demonstrate their learning with visual texts. Students will still work to improve their writing skills through the planning stages of the assignments, but the final product will be a visual text. Projects can include research videos in place of traditional essays, a video news report in place of a written article, a short film in place of a short story, or other projects that we haven’t even thought of yet! Students will have the freedom to choose topics of interest and will be encouraged to select topics that cover cross-curricular learning outcomes. Our team includes most of our teaching staff and all of the major subject areas that our school offers. Some students have begun the planning process and are eagerly awaiting the delivery of the technology so they can begin production. We are very excited to jump in and see what our students are capable of! |
AuthorErin Fletcher is a humanities teacher at Twin Rivers Education Centre in Kamloops, BC. Archives
June 2021
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