This past week I had the incredible opportunity to attend and present at the Global Ed Forum in Philadelphia, PA. My Fulbright colleague, Erin, and I proposed a presentation in June prior to leaving Finland and we were accepted and were so excited to be able to talk to others about Finland and Fulbright (and travel to another city together and reunite for a few days). This conference was so worthwhile and motivating and I am now home with a million new ideas I want to try in my classroom. I came back with not just new lesson plan ideas, but questions about how I can help my students learn more about global issues.
After a bit of a rocky trip to Philadelphia on Wednesday night I was looking forward to participating in the pre-conference workshop on Problem Based Learning (PBL). I knew about PBL and know a few teachers that teach using PBL to varying degrees in their classrooms, but this workshop advertised that the participants would be put in the role of student and actually experience PBL with a task related to the Philadelphia community. I lived in Philadelphia for six years and was excited to reacquaint myself with the community and I'm always looking for new ways to infuse problem based learning into my classroom so I thought this would be a great opportunity. And I was not disappointed!
Problem Based Learning starts with an entry activity that gets the learners excited about the project. It introduces the topic, some information, or an idea that leads students to the driving question. We listened to some sound bites from a YouTube clip from the Philadelphia History Truck. People spoke about their memories of a Philadelphia from a time past and left us hanging with all sorts of questions. We were then given our task and a question to answer. The driving question for the project of the day was: "How can we amplify diverse community voices to understand the past and inform the future?" We were really given very little guidance beyond knowing that we had the morning to go out into the community and ultimately needed to make a ten minute digital presentation to our colleagues with our answer to the driving question. The only other guideline was that we had to bring back four artifacts, two for the past and two for the future. Wow! Once we got into groups of four we had time to look over the assignment more closely and made a list of our "need to knows." These were things that we wanted to know both about the nuts and bolds of the assignment like "what counts as an artifact" and "where do we go to get started" as well as things we wanted to learn through this project like "what was Philly like in the past" and "what are people's hopes for the future of Philadelphia." We had a lot of questions we wanted answered about the process before we got started...and our facilitators answered none of them. Basically they said, "Ok, great questions. See you back here in 2 hours. We will check in by cell phone in an hour and at that point you need the title of your project and the idea for your four artifacts." Ok...
My group was fantastic. Our group of four women were from California, Binghamton, NY, India and me. No one knew anything about Philadelphia so luckily I could at least give us the lay of the land. Our conference center was right across the street from Reading Terminal Market so I suggested we start by going there and then later head towards Old City and the historic buildings. We decided we wanted to interview four different people and wanted to try to find a wide range of subjects: young and old, diverse races, different amounts of time spent in Philadelphia. As we approached the Market we ran into our first subject, Alihu. He was playing the flute right outside the doors to the Market and it was easy to engage with him. We introduced ourselves and asked him some questions. He was in Philly to be with his daughter but had been born and raised in New York. He loved to play his flute and keyboards and used to travel all over to perform. Now he mostly stays in Philly but travels to see his family. He also makes ceramic flutes for his family to play and it was clear his family was number one in his life. He couldn't give us much about his vision for the future; he said his future was to meet his Lord in Heaven. We could have hung out with him for hours. We played name that tune and danced on the streets and asked him to play us a tune we could record. We took pictures together but then regrettably had to get going or we were never going to finish the project.
My colleagues had not been in Reading Terminal Market before and the sights and smells overwhelmed us all. Fresh meat, bread, and produce lined the aisles of the jam packed stalls and we didn't know where to begin. As we walked past a stall selling fresh meat we noticed a young girl dressed in traditional Amish clothing with a bonnet on her head and decided to talk to her. Kaylene is just fourteen years old and is one of the many Amish women working at Reading Terminal Market. She is from Lancaster, PA and her family has owned the stall in the market for at least twenty years. According to the Reading Terminal Market Website Halteman Family Country Foods is a "family owned and operated Pennsylvania Dutch store specializing in farm raised ducks, geese, beef, and pork. Also selling homemade sausages, locally made jams and jellies, honey and Lancaster County produce." Kaylene explained that she works at the market a few days a week and the rest of the time she is homeschooled and is currently in ninth grade. She said that she meets a lot of interesting people working in the market and really likes it. We asked about her vision for her future and she wasn't sure what her future would look like. She is still very young and would ultimately have to make decisions about whether to continue the Amish way of life or to join the more modern society. Later we looked up information about the Amish and the Halteman market and found that many of the Amish and Mennonite families have had to turn to non-Amish people to help start and maintain a website and/or social media accounts in order to keep their businesses alive. We found Halteman's had a Facebook page, a Twitter account and an Instagram feed; we did not expect that from an Amish store but later found an article that explained how the Amish need to hire some "plain people" to help run an online store if the business wants to stay economically stable and viable. We had a lot more questions to ask Kaylene but it was clear her mother was hovering and was not so happy about us talking to Kaylene when she should be working so we thanked her for her time and moved along.
As we continued to walk we found the Golden Bowl Chinese Restaurant. As it was still before 11:00 AM there were no customers looking for Chinese food so there was no one at the stall. We started a conversation with a young man in his twenties and asked if he had any cool stories about working in the Market. He was not very interested in talking to us and said he had no good stories. He told us he had been in Philly his whole life and was stuck there. He said he couldn't leave because he didn't have the money to get out and go somewhere new. As we tried to engage him in conversation he then pointed to an older woman walking behind the counter and told us to talk to her. He said she would have good stories. And he was right!
Hee Mun was born in Korea and as a young girl moved to Houston. After living in Houston for a few years her cousin brought her to Philadelphia to work in her fish market right outside Reading Terminal Market. A few years later she started working for her friend in a Chinese restaurant. When the friend's husband passed away Hee Mun took over the business and has been running it for years. As the owner of this restaurant she has meet two presidents - Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. She is very proud of this and her picture with Obama hangs right on the wall of the restaurant with the article that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer after his visit. Hee Mun is happy in Philadelphia and does not want to move back to Korea despite the growth the country has had since the 1980's when she first came to Philadelphia. She has seen a lot of change in the city since the 1980's in both positive and negative ways. She is saddened by the violence that plagues the city but also noted the new buildings and businesses that are thriving in Philly. She is hopeful for the future and is happy to be there.
We were having a great time in Reading Terminal Market but wanted to branch out a little bit. We decided to head a few blocks east to go to Independence Hall and the visitor's center to see if we could perhaps talk to a tour guide or someone else who had been in Philadelphia for a long time. We certainly found someone who had been in Philly a looooooong time. In the Independence Visitors Center we noticed a man wearing a tri-cornered hat and stopped to talk to him. Robert Herr told us he was born in England and came to this new country just before the Revolutionary War. He came to Philadelphia in search of opportunity. He left King George's England seeking more economic opportunities and thought coming to the new country would give him the freedom to grow. Herr had not fought in the Revolutionary War nor did he own any property (slaves) but was fascinated watching Philadelphia grow and change. He owned a brewery near Independence Hall and was hopeful for the future of these new United States. This interview was both highly amusing but also really informative. Herr's interview was a great artifact for our past pieces and we were really happy to have run into him. When we went searching for some history we had no idea we'd time travel back to late 1790's Philadelphia to meet Mr. Herr!
We returned to our conference center at noon and continued to talk about what we found over lunch. We then had just slightly more than an hour to put together our final presentation. We made a Google Slides presentation that included a video of Alihu playing his flute, an audio clip of Hee Mun talking about coming to Philadelphia to work in the Market and a video of Robert Herr talking about why he came to Philadephia and not one of the other colonies. Using the slides, video and audio we gave a ten minute presentation to our peers as well as some invited guests from the hotel so that we had an authentic audience (a key part of PBL). Robert Herr and Hee Mun represented the history of Philadelphia and Alihu and Kaylene represented the future of the city. We talked about Kaylene's youth and wide open world of opportunities and Alihu's focus on his family and music in his future. We were learning so much as we dove further into our interviews but were very limited on time. Our final product was satisfactory but we could have created something even more spectacular with more time. Our facilitators reminded us that sometimes our students feel the same way, but the reality is that we can't have an infinite amount of time on a project and sometimes good enough has to be good enough.
All the final presentations were great but the one I was most impressed with was by a group that created a panel of Philadelphians. This group posted an ad on craigslist.org as soon as we got our assignment looking for people to interview about life in Philly in the past and present with an eye towards the future. They ended up creating an amazing four person panel that they interviewed right on the spot for us. I kept thinking that had I been the teacher of that group I might have discouraged such a crazy, out of the box idea. I might have even been discouraging as a member of that group. I walked away thinking about how these crazy ideas are often the ones that become the most fascinating and that I really do need to let my students (and my own children) think outside of the box and should encourage them to be creative and take a leap of faith. This group even brought a homeless, pregnant woman into the panel! It was just so cool and so creative and ultimately so educational.
I had so much fun being part of this day of PBL. I learned a lot about how to design problems for my students and how to facilitate their discovery. There is a lot of behind the scenes work that goes into PBL but ultimately students have a lot of freedom and have to do a lot of discovery to get to the final end product and that end product can look very different for each group or individual. I have some more ideas for PBL especially in my math class and am looking forward to implementing those over time. It's nice to have the opportunity to try it out with my really small math class (of only 2 students) before I try to roll out some of these projects with larger classes. PBL is definitely a buzz word in education right now, but it makes sense for so many reasons. It is getting kids out of the classroom or at least out of the textbook. They are able to design their own projects; there is room for creativity and there are opportunities to control their learning. PBL does not eliminate the standard quizzes and tests, but those are just part of the final assessment. There are so many ways to make education more engaging and I'm looking forward to using PBL in my work with students.