Service Learning: Finishing and Reflecting

IV. Published Authors

The joke-writing and illustrating continues for several weeks. We collect a couple of dozen that we all like - both originals and recycled ones - and I create a page template that has a border around it, the joke written in bold print, and a space at the bottom for the illustrator(s) to write their name.

We spend one week doing drafts. Before starting, we have a conversation about illustrating. We talk about the books that we like the most and what they look like. The point I'm hoping to make with them is that the illustrations should be colorful and take up the full page. "What are some of your favorite books?" I ask. We take some out of the classroom library to look at. "What do you see? What do the pages look like?" The answers are just what I was hoping for: lots of colors, pretty colors, big drawings, pictures that describe the words. We take out some sample jokes and think about what the illustrations could be. It's another spirited discussion.

As children work on their drafts, alone or with friends, I walk around and point out the things that I see them doing. "You're using a lot of colors here." "That grape really does look old and wrinkled." "The king in your picture has such an expressive face." It's exciting. I tell them that everyone should do at least one draft, but they can do more than one if they want to. When they are ready for a final draft, they'll tell me.

After a few weeks, the drawings are finished. I tell the class that I am going to take them to a copier to create our book and that next week I'll bring it back to share. The teacher and I have agreed that we will make two copies: one for the hospital and one for the class library.

When I get back to the office, I make a cover out of clip art and and write a short introduction:

Why We Wrote This Book

This spring, we began working on our Peacemaker Project, a chance for us to use what we learned about being good friends to make our community a better place. We talked about who helps our community and about who in our community might be sad.

Some of us have friends or family who have been in the hospital, and we know that sometimes when they are sick that they feel sad. We talked about how to make them feel better, and we agreed that one of the best ways is to laugh.

And that is why we wrote this book. We found some of our favorite jokes, and we wrote some of our own. Then, we illustrated them with lots of colors, just like the picture books we like the best.

We hope that you enjoy reading it and that you laugh and share your favorite jokes with some of your friends and family.

When it's finished, it's a big hit - and it looks even better than I thought it would. The book is going to be given to the Center for Families at Children's Hospital, one of whose many programs is their mobile lending libraries. We invite the Peace Games Coordinator to the class so that we can hand the book over to her (and so that she can deliver it).We finish the year with a lot of satisfaction and gratitude - and lots of laughs.

That would have been enough but for an unexpected email that found me at the end of the summer. It was from the doctor who came to visit the class the previous spring:

I wanted to let you know that the Children's Hospital Library loved the Joke Book produced by those great 2nd (and now 3rd) graders. In fact, they would like to know if you could make more copies to supple some of their 'mobile' library carts at their expense? Please let me know how much it will cost to reproduce and I will forward the information. Please say hello to the class for me and talk to you soon.

We gave them one book, but then they bought two more - an instant classic and bestseller.

Service Learning: Creating Community Change (and A Lot of Laughs)

III. Getting Things Done

With the seed of an idea planted, the next week we review what we have learned: Children's Hospital has a lot of toys - including Playstation! - but they could use some laughter. We spend some time talking about what we know about jokes.

I start by asking if anyone has ever heard a joke that they thought was funny. A lot of hands go up. I ask if anyone has ever told a joke. More hands. I ask if anyone has a joke that they remember that they'd like to tell the group. The hands stay up, even straining to get raised higher.

So, we start telling jokes. I start.

"What did the zero say to the eight?" I ask to a circle full of smiling children and anticipatory stares.

"Nice belt." The teacher laughs out loud. So do I. A few children do, but others are less sure, laughing more because the rest of us are and besides which this is a pretty fun way to spend a morning. I explain the joke (zero + belt = eight), and then we're all laughing together, although some more tentatively than others.

I try the Interrupting Cow Joke, which I'd originally learned from an eight year-old. I ask them if anyone knows the Interrupting Cow Joke. They all shake their heads. I tell them that it's a knock-knock joke, and ask if they're ready. They say they are.

"Knock, knock," I say.

"Who's there?" they respond.

"The interrupting cow," I tell them.

"The interru---"

"Moo!"

I love this joke. We're all laughing. Clearly, this is my kind of an audience. Much more receptive than the late 20's, early 30's crowd who are usually subjected to my joke-telling. I ask the teacher if she's got any jokes that she likes, and she says she's not very good at remembering jokes, so I turn to the class. A few of the children offer jokes. We all laugh, whether or not they make sense, mostly because it's such a joyful conversation to have. I observe that this class has clearly found its niche. We get consensus that our project should be a joke book, made up of our some of our favorites.

I give the class homework. For next week, everyone should bring in a joke. They could find it in a book or they could get it from someone in their family or a friend. They could even write it themselves. But wherever they find it, they should write it down and bring it in, and next week we'll sit and tell each other some of our favorite jokes. The teacher agrees to put it in the homework log and we call it a week.

We end with a game.

* * *

The next class arrives, and most everyone has a joke. Some have written them down. Some just remember them. Some are holding the class library's joke books in their hands.

We go around the circle. I tell them that if they don't have one or don't want to share, I'd skip them or come back to them, but everyone should get a chance to share.

They are hilarious, even the ones that don't make sense:

• "Knock, knock." "Who's there?" "Ann." "Ann who?" "An old wrinkled grape."
  
• What do you call cheese that is not your own? Nacho cheese.
  
• "Knock, knock." "Who's there?" "Fry." "Fry who?" "Fry me some chicken."
  
• Why do you cross the street? To see the monkeys.
  

We're all smiles. And what's more remarkable is that we're able to carry on the conversation for more than 30 minutes, an impressive stretch for eight year-olds. When I think about it later, I think that it must be in part because of the novelty of the conversation topic, but also because everyone's involved. We've bought into not only the outcomes of our project (a way to help children in the hospital), but we've also bought into the process.

In the weeks ahead, we'd tell more jokes, look at what makes a good picture book, and get to work...

...to be continued

See other posts in this series:

• Part I: Making Peacemaking Real
• Part II: Creating Community Connections
• Part IV: Finishing and Reflecting

Service Learning: Building Authentic Community Connections

II. How To Help

With a list of ideas in hand, the next logical step is to figure out not what we want to do but what would add the most value to the community we are trying to help.

Some years ago, I worked in a community organization that served homeless children. We would regularly receive phone calls from school groups that would call to say something like, "Our Community Service Club is looking to do a 'Day of Service,' and we'd like to come in and help the children." These invitations were often complemented by a suggestion of how they could help, given the restrictions on their time and what they hoped to get out of it. Maybe they could come in and play with the children or do arts and crafts, they suggested, so that they could see the impact of their work.

I understood the impulse. I truly did. Making a personal connection is always going to be more meaningful than collecting bags of donated toys or organizing a bake sale. But their view of how to help us was vastly different from our view of how they could help us.

One-day service trips, especially to spend time with the children I worked with, wound up doing more harm than good. They cheated the children in our program out of their very real need to form lasting and supportive relationships, in a climate in which so much remained unstable. What would add more value (and do far less harm), as cliched as it seemed, was in fact a donation of toys or money - or better yet, a six-month long commitment to volunteer every week and form those relationships. And when we explained this to the would-be do-gooders, we generally were met with understanding and agreement, if a bit of a let-down. Sometimes, we got the donation. Sometimes, they went in search of another, more authentic experience. So it goes.

* * *

And so, in my work with these second graders, the challenge was to take their impulse and to find ways that they could help, in a way that they had chosen and in a way that would not run counter to the stated needs of those we wanted to serve.

With this goal in mind and buoyed by a clear direction and a long list of possibilities, we mention what we've done so far to the Peace Games Coordinator at the school, who tells us that by a seemingly providential coincidence her partner is a researcher at Children's Hospital. After talking about it for a little while, it seems likely that we could get her partner and the pediatrician at the hospital to come and speak to the class. The goal of the visit, we agree, would be to help us narrow our options by giving us a better picture of what it's like to be a child in the hospital and how we, as a class of second graders, could make the most positive contribution.

The day of the visit arrives, and the children are excited. Dr. Euler is wearing his white doctor's coat and has brought some toy doctor's tools, such as a stethaschope and blood pressure pump, and he tells us what he does and what it's like at the hospital. The children are enthralled - and especially excited by the toys.

We share the list we've created with him, and he looks it over. He agrees that it would be better for the doctors and nurses to give the medicine. And that inviting the patients over to their house is probably not a great idea. To our mild surprise, he also nixes the idea of collecting toys. "This may sound a little weird," he says, "but Children's Hospital is actually a pretty happy place for a hospital. We've got lots of toys." By way of illustrating this, he explains that every room has a Playstation console, which gets a lot of wild-eyed stares of disbelief and some hoots of approval. Clearly, they are not wanting for toys.

He is, however, impressed with the idea of sharing jokes. Like us, he agrees that laughter can make someone feel less sad, but he adds that sometimes laughter can help make someone get better when they are sick. If we collected jokes, he speculates, they could add it to their library cart at the hospital. Having jokes that other children laugh at - or even wrote themselves - would be more meaningful than other books. "It's a thought, anyway," he says.

He leaves the toys with the teacher and thanks the class for their good ideas. The teacher takes pictures. And we end the class, of course, with a game.

... to be continued ...

See the other posts in this series:

• Part I: Making Peacemaking Real
• Part III: Creating Community Change
• Part IV: Finishing and Reflecting
  

Service Learning: Making Peacemaking Real

Spring means that Peace Games classes shift from teaching the skills of peacemaking to helping students put peacemaking into action. Peacemaker Projects are service learning projects that are developed and implemented by the students, with some help and guidance from their teachers. After four lessons to explore the concept of service and community, students begin the process of figuring out who to help and how. Here, then, is the story of one project.


I. Who Needs Help?

When we ask the second graders if there are people in their community that need, somewhat ambiguously, "help," we expect the usual cascade of well-meaning but somewhat recycled cliches (the poor, the homeless, maybe a police officer or fire fighter; all of them good and worthwhile suggestions). Instead, the class zeroes in on a pretty simple concept: people who feel sad.

Well, that could mean a lot of people, at least some of the time. Who are some people who might feel sad? we ask. One girl raises her hand and says, "Sick children?"

Indeed, we agreed children who are sick might feel sad. And then another child volunteers that she had a cousin who was sick and that, actually, her cousin had been in the hospital. It was a comment that helped her make a personal connection to the conversation - and it seemed to generate a more generalized empathy. After all, we all know what it's like not to feel well, even if we haven't stayed in a hospital.

Hmmm, so what could we do, we ask, to help a sick child in the hospital feel better?

"Give them medicine?" one boy says. "Or chicken soup," another adds. "Give them my toys?" offers a boy sitting at the front. "Play video games!" calls another, seemingly spurred by the reference to toys, which generates a lot of suggestions that we go play all kinds games with them. "Let them come to my house?" one girl suggests, earnestly but with a little hesitation since she hasn't cleared this with her mother. "Visit them," says a boy, with a tone of obviousness, surprised that he hasn't thought of this, "and bring them flowers," he adds. At this, another girl suggests bringing balloons, which gets a lot of support and nods of agreement. Side conversations start up about how nice it is to get balloons and about a time that they'd received balloons.

The more we talk, the more the suggestions come. All of them are written down. Eventually, the conversation starts to resemble one that we had earlier in the year, when we'd talked about how to support a friend when they can see that they're either upset or angry. That conversation had centered a lot on how you can make someone smile or laugh, even when they might not feel like it. We make an oblique reference to this, and sure enough someone offers, "Make them laugh! Tell them jokes!" It's added to the list.

Once we have a long list, we say that we should try to figure out what might be possible. We point out that we probably can't give medicine to the children in the hospital - the nurses and doctors probably want to do this, we say, and get agreement. We also say that it might be hard to go visit, especially if some children are really sick, but we don't know for sure. We rephrase some of the other suggestions: collecting and giving toys to a hospital, balloons (of course), making cards.

All of these are good, but what about the joke-telling suggestion. I'm drawn to it and its possibilities, but stuck on the fact that it would be hard to write a stand-up routine and bring it to a pediatric ward. If we can't go to them, how could we send the jokes in our place?

And then it comes to me, a joke book. It might be too much, but I suggest it, and it gets enough agreement to be added.

And with that, we take the list and summarize what we know about our Peacemaker Project so far: we are going to do something to help children in the hospital, children who are sick and who might feel sad. We don't know how yet, but we have a lot of good ideas. And next week, we'll try to find one that works.

We end the class, of course, with a game.

...to be continued.

See other posts in this series:

• Part II: Building Authentic Community Connections
• Part III: Creating Community Change
• Part IV: Finishing and Reflecting
  

When The Teacher's Away

In the season of flus, family vacations, and fearless weather-related commuting, substitute teachers tend to get some extra work. That was the case last week in my Peace Games class.

Given all of the variables that a substitute teacher introduces into a classroom - new routines, unknown names or personalities, a lesson plan that may be too much or not nearly enough - the day can quickly descend into six hours of crowd control. It was certainly the case when I was in school and not much has changed in the years since. I'm used to this, and so when the students were a little rowdier than usual I took it in stride. I saw it as an opportunity to let some of their true selves rise to the surface. I saw that Caroline is the not-so-subtle leader - the real "Queen Bee" - in this class, as she gathered friends around her and excluded others. I tried to console Lebron through his suddenly unpredictable mood swings, as he went from coloring quietly to tossing his marker across the room to nursing his bruised ego. And I couldn't help but see that Zhade stayed remarkably calm through all of the chaos. I just tried to take it all in and make it a learning experience, more for me than for them but I thought that was pretty good considering. I mean, we got through a lesson plan and no one was seriously injured, egos aside, so I called that a success.

My co-teacher, a graduate student originally from Eastern Europe, saw the scene very differently. She was mortified. And when I told her that it was really pretty good in comparison to some I'd seen, she was in shock. I wondered whether maybe I'd just become immune - or worse, insensitive. The more people she spoke to, however, the more normalized it seemed to become: this is just the way things are, at least in this country. She seemed disinclined to settle for this oversimplification, and her perspective got me thinking a little bit about substitute teachers and what they inspire.

I picked over in my head some of the more memorable substitute teachers I'd had in my lifetime and some of the things that we'd done to them, and it occured to me: being a student in a substitute teacher's classroom is quite possibly the closest I've ever come to being in a mob. It really was like a mob mentality. I remembered one day with particular horror. I think it was fifth grade and by the end of the day students were literally lifting their desks and chairs over their head and carrying them out of the building. They wanted to sit outside, they explained, and out they went. And meanwhile, inside, it was a free-for-all - running, falling over each other, scribbling on each other's notebooks, using colored chalk on the board - and I was right in there. And it's not like we didn't know how to behave - or didn't expect to be reprimanded as severely as we were (and as we surely deserved to be) - but it felt out of our hands. We were looking for leadership, and when we couldn't find it at the front of the classroom (from this poor woman who'd never been to our class, who didn't know the first thing about us, who was wholly ill-equipped for what we threw her way, both literally and figuratively) we looked to each other. The loud voices rose to the top, by their words and their actions, and pretty soon we were all maurauding with the best of them. A righteous, directionless mob of 10 year-olds.

In the aftermath - the day after - we took a real verbal thrashing from our teacher (who, in fairness to us, had been very transparent about her "Irish temper" on the first day of school, so we really should've known better). I'd never seen her so mad. And when she asked - no, demanded - that we explain ourselves, there wasn't one person who could do it adequately. After all, what excuses could we give? There were none. We couldn't understand what we'd done. It was as if we had been in a trance - or at least, that's how I felt.

So, what to do. After all, despite best intentions and hopes to the contrary, most every teacher needs to take a sick day once in awhile - and it's in these situations that we, as the adults, look to students to be the leaders. And there's no question that this is exactly what they become. The question is, what kind of leadership will they show? The true test determinant in whether we have prepared them adequately to be peacemakers is what happens when a fight breaks out and no adult is there to be the deterrent or arbitrator. What instincts win out in a vacuum?

Of course, our class last week was just one mile marker on the road to peacemaking. It wasn't the worst case scenario, but when we were confronted with conflicts we tended to juggle them rather than manage them. It's what most teachers do all day long, out of necessity. Because of that - and because a week has passed and because I'd become acclimated to craziness around substitute teachers, unlike my co-teacher - I'd been inclined just to let it all go, to go in next week and leave the "baggage" at the door and start over. It's not an entirely bad idea, necessarily, but it lacks a little creativity and a lot of courage.

It takes courage to confront conflict and be willing to acknowledge it, to say unambiguously, There was a problem here and here's how it made me feel. It's a not-so-tacit way of saying that actions have reactions and consequences, and it uses a real and non-abstract example. It doesn't need to be finger-wagging and scolding, but if done well and to the point it could create a new set of expectations for the next time we're on our own, expectations rooted not just in "rules" but in relationships.

And that, really, is at the heart of this peacemaking thing.

From Kindergarten to the Campaign Trail

I remember writing a "short story" in fifth grade, in which I was the President of the United States. As I recall, the plot was either unconventional or uninteresting, depending on your point of view: I stopped at a McDonald's and wound up being mobbed by the adoring crowds before sneaking back to the White House with tattered clothes and a half-eaten cheeseburger. Another report came out this week that suggests that my story - or even the remote possibility that my teacher, Ms. McNamee, remembers reading it - may come back to haunt me, should I ever decide to run for public office.

Kids, be careful what you write about wanting to be president. Those refrigerator gems are now fair game. As reported in the Chicago Tribune this weekend, the rhetoric between Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama has turned into something resembling a recess spat. This weekend, Clinton's campaign issued a press release that cited these alarming anecdotes:

• In third grade, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled 'I Want To Be a President.' His third grade teacher: Fermina Katarina Sinaga "asked her class to write an essay titled 'My dream: What I want to be in the future.' Senator Obama wrote 'I want to be a President,' she said." [The Los Angeles Times, 3/15/07]

• In kindergarten, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled 'I Want to Become President.’ "Iis Darmawan, 63, Senator Obama's kindergarten teacher, remembers him as an exceptionally tall and curly haired child who quickly picked up the local language and had sharp math skills. He wrote an essay titled, 'I Want To Become President,' the teacher said." [AP, 1/25/07 ]

They were part of her rebuttal to Obama's claims that, unlike himself, "others" in the field have been priming their careers and angling for the presidency for decades. Sure showed him, I'd say.

This new strategy notwithstanding, I have no regrets about that fifth grade story. I've since become a vegetarian, tend to shun suit-wearing whenever possible, and feel okay with not being president - but there is something affirming about having been able, encouraged even, to write a story like that. In fact, I'd suspect that Little Hillary has a few of these in her past, too. They are hallmarks of hopeful childhoods that have had at least some modicum of encouragement, whether that be from a family member or from someone like either Ms. Darmawan or Ms. Sinaga (in Obama's past) or Ms. McNamee (in mine).

Enseñando La Paz en Colombia

"[Peace Games] changed the way I look at my students."

- first grade teacher, Norte de Santander, Colombia

Those who attended the Second Annual Peace Games Network Conference this past June are already acquainted with Juegos de Paz.

Peace Games in Colombia has its roots in relationships, happy accidents, and the uncompromising commitment of some brave and thoughtful individuals. In 2002, a young Colombian woman studying English in Boston walked into our offices and asked if she could be an intern. Thankfully, our Director of the Peace Games Institute, Steven Brion-Meisels, had the foresight to say yes. This young woman taught a weekly Peace Games class at the Kenny School in Dorchester and did some rudimentary translation work.

Her name is Silvia Diazgranados Ferráns.

When Silvia returned to Colombia, she began working with former guerrilla soldiers, helping them to reintegrate into society. At about this same time, the new administration in Colombia launched a drive to create national citizenship competencies and invited colleagues from around the world to present at the First National Forum on Citizenship Education in Bogotá in October 2004, including Silvia and our own Steven Brion-Meisels.

The citizenship competencies that were developed as a result of the forum were thorough, thoughtful, and a reflection of the collective wisdom and commitment of their authors. The comptencies were organized in three strands: convivencia en paz (living together in peace), participación democratica (democratic participation), and pluralidad (plurality or diversity). That peace is a central tenet of their citizenship education is surely a reflection of a culture in which more than 20,000 people still lose their lives to homicide each year, but it also reflects a deep and abiding commitment to peacemaking that perhaps only those who have lived with war can appreciate.

Putting Peace Games to the Test
Attending the forum were teachers from the rural department of Norte de Santander, an expansive province in the northeastern part of the country and a "hot zone" for paramilitary activity. The local Department of Education in Norte de Santander had received money from the World Bank to pilot programs aimed toward teaching the new citizenship standards, and they asked if they could use a portion of the funding to teach Peace Games - in Spanish, Juegos de Paz.

What made Peace Games in Colombia possible was Silvia's unassailable drive to have the curriculum translated, published, and adapted for Colombian schools. Almost single-handedly, she brought people together who could make it possible: Steven and other Peace Games staff, representatives from the Ministry of Education, and the founder and publisher of Magisterio, a non-profit publishing company based in Bogotá. When an agreement was made, Silvia and her mother immediately began translating the curriculum. She enlisted an incredibly gifted painter and family friend (Elvira Rico Grillo, who taught herself how to use new graphics design software specifically for the project) to provide the original illustrations. And she wrote new Colombia-specific material, compiled new booklists pertinent for Latin America, and personally oversaw the layout and final proofs of all eight books (one book each for kindergarten through fifth grade, one for our community service learning curriculum, and the games book).

With the books available, the Ministry of Education enlisted Silvia and a team she assembled from Universidad de Los Andes to administer a pilot program for Juegos de Paz. The pilot would be six months long and would enlist five "educative centers," including three escuelas nuevas. Escuelas nuevas are schools adapted for a rural setting. They have a central administration building and several remote classrooms that operate as one-room schoolhouses.

With the schools chosen, the pilot began in January 2006. A team of three trainers from Peace Games in the United States and the Los Andes team met in Bogotá and traveled to Bochalema, a small town in Norte de Santander, where they spent five days training 45 teachers and administrators. Following the training, teachers spent four months teaching the Peace Games curriculum, including Peacemaker Projects - mostly in 90-minute blocks. At the conclusion of the pilot, the entire group reconvened in Bochalema in June 2006 to evaluate and celebrate their work.

Drawing on pre- and post-surveys as well as interviews with teachers, students, and administrators, the Los Andes team wrote an exhaustive 80-page report on the pilot and submitted it to the Ministry of Education, which determined that "Juegos de Paz" was a viable and compelling program for Colombia. But perhaps more compelling than the report were the words of one of the teachers who took aside one of the U.S. trainers at the conclusion of the second training and said, "You're helping to bring peace to my country."

Continuing to Grow
At the June 2006 training in Bochalema, teachers and administrators at each school agreed enthusiastically that they wanted to continue using Peace Games - and in fact that they wanted to expand the reach of Peace Games in their communities. In the summer of 2007, the teachers' cooperative in Norte de Santander, in partnership with the Los Andes team from the pilot, applied for and received funding from the European Union Laboratorio de Paz to bring Peace Games to additional schools and to build a local network of Peace Games schools. Thanks to this support, Peace Games is now being taught in six additional schools in Norte de Santander, bringing the total of sites to 23.

In addition, funding from the Interamerican Development Bank is going to be used to implement and evaluate seven programs for teaching citzenship in medium-sized cities in Colombia. Peace Games is one of only two international programs chosen and will most likely be taught in schools in Barrancabermeja, a city in central Colombia, beginning in January 2009. This project will be led by Freddy Velandia, a former social studies teacher working on the competencias ciudadanas program at the Ministry and who attended the Peace Games National Conference in June 2007.

Another important way that Peace Games continues to reach committed educators is through Magisterio, which has to date sold more than 5,000 copies of its Colección Juegos de Paz books throughout Colombia, including 300 sets to the Department of Education in Bogotá (as well as Peru, Argentina, Venezuela, and who knows where else).

Beyond these projects, the future of "Juegos de Paz" is still being forged. In many ways, it continues in much the same way that it began: it remains rooted in relationships. Silvia, Lina, Berta, and Marcela - the Los Andes team that has managed the pilot and the Peace Lab work - continues to respond to requests for Peace Games on our behalf. Alfredo and his family at Magisterio continues to cultivate relationships with schools buying the curriculum. And allies at the Ministry continue to be strong supporters committed to making sure that Peace Games is "more than a set of books on a shelf."