Peace and Social Justice Website

Peace and Social Justice Web Site - St. Mary's School

Our theme for this schol year concerns peace and justice. As little as two years ago, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany encouraged our schools to form"faithful citizens".

This year at St. Mary's School we will explore, develop and even blog what is meant by "faithful citizens." Some of our goals this year and some questions we will ask are:

• What is a "faithful citizen"? In other words, is it enough to be "people of faith" in terms of character formation or does or citizenship extend beyond a laudable personal morality?
• Might this be a year of learning about various issues, what causes these needs to come about and what changes may need to take place to change our world at a systemic level?

Introduction

This project's purpose is twofold:

• To explore digitally through the use of a website and a blog, the world of social justice. Some questions that we will ask involove:
• What is a citizen?
• What do we mean by "faithful" citizen?
• Can we use technology, specifically a blog for social change?
• To explore educationally ways that we can meet our youth in their highly digital world. The main technologies explored in this project are a web site and a blog.
  

It's Only a Game - Why We Need to pay attention to the Games our Kids Play!

Recently, I discovered the world of video games and am more convinced than ever that we need to pay attention to the games our kids play. Could it be that the designers of these games are tapping into cognitive learning structures while educators lag behind? Check out these sites and let me know what you think.

What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy - by James Gee y "will open your mind to the possibility that video games are the forerunners of instructional tools that will determine how we learn in the future. The premise is not that what people learn when they are playing video games is always good-- but rather that what they are doing when they are playing video games is often good learning." Full Story

More on this from Wired Magazine

What Educators are Saying about Blogs

Weblogs in Education: Bringing the World to the Liberal Arts Classroom

- Sarah Lohnes

A new, easy-to-use web publishing tool known as a weblog allows users to publish content to the web from their browsers, providing users with an unprecedented ability to participate in the internet community. In the true liberal arts tradition, teachers and students are using these tools to effectively break down the walls of the classroom, integrating teaching and learning with local and virtual communities.

Weblogs?

Weblogs, or "blogs," provide an easy way for non-technical users to publish content (writing, links, photos, etc.) to the web via a standard web browser. This content often takes the shape of chronological postings, much like journal entries, which are archived after a certain period of time. Over the past year and a half, weblogs have garnered a great deal of media attention, from The New York Times to The Guardian to Wired. They have been used primarily as personal journals or diaries, or as a vehicle for amateur journalists to self-publish on the web.

To further understand the place that weblogs occupy in today's society and their use as an educational tool, it is helpful to have a little more background. In 1999, Pyra Labs introduced Blogger, a weblog service that offered free creation and hosting of weblogs. Shortly thereafter, UserLand Software followed suit with the announcement of Manila, its server-based content management software. Both products allow users to publish material to the web using a simple browser-based interface: choose a template, fill in a form, click a button, and a weblog is born. Publishing a website is no longer the domain of the nerd; furthermore, it has become even easier than using traditional web publishing software to create and publish web pages to your personal web space. Indeed, the new weblog software is more than a neat technological trick; it is, in fact, the basis for the onslaught of personal weblogs that has captured the national media's attention. Full Story ...

Weblogs - The Possibilites are Limitless

NECC 2004 What are weblogs? Where can I find educational weblogs? What are the possibilities for weblogs in education? How can you create your own weblog? Posted by Anne Davis on 10/7/03; 3:19:45 PM from the dept. Discuss (1 response)

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This Page was last update: Tuesday, October 7, 2003 at 3:19:45 PM
This page was originally posted: 10/7/03; 3:19:45 PM.
Copyright 2005 Weblogs: The Possibilities Are Limitless!

To Blog or Not to Blog - a webquest about blogs by Judith Cramer.

Cognitive Flexibility Theory and the Blog

I find in my writing, I can be much more reflective and constructive of my own knowledge when I am able to hyperlink back and forth to other text and information. I think it is a way to let my reader see into my world and construct knowledge right along with me. It’s like sharing a good book and your ideas about it on steroids. After I read about the Cognitive Flexibility Theory,which states, "

"A critical goal of many education programs, especially in professional education, is to help the students transfer what they have learned to different, even unique, situations. This ability is often referred to as "cognitive flexibility." "[T]his includes the ability to represent knowledge from different conceptual and case perspectives and then, when the knowledge must later be used, the ability to construct from those different conceptual and case representations a knowledge ensemble tailored to the needs of the understanding or problem-solving situation at hand" (Spiro, et al., 1992, p. 58). According to cognitive flexibility theory, the way students are taught is a significant influence on the type of cognitive structures they create and the way they store and structure knowledge they acquire determines to a great extent how flexible they will be when they must use that knowledge. Encouraging cognitive flexibility requires a flexible teaching environment. Information must be presented in a variety of ways, as well as for a variety of different purposes. Flexible instructional methods help students learn the contours and complexity of the material they are studying, and it helps them work with that content from several different perspectives (Spiro, et al., 1992).

The computer, with appropriate supporting material, is well-suited to flexible instruction. It can provide the variability needed to present ill-structured knowledge domains and to help students explore more than one perspective on a topic or issue. For example, hypertext systems provide a nonlinear, multi-dimensional medium in which to present complex subject matter that traditional systems (textbooks, lectures, etc.) lack. It is important, however, to keep in mind that traditional instruction may be very successful in teaching well-structured, simple subject matter. When the information is not simple and well structured, the power of the computer and the format of hypertext support a more flexible approach to instruction that some have called random access instruction (Spiro, et al., 1992). This allows the learner to access information as needed in any order pertinent to the his or her needs"

Now I was able to verbalize what I had been observing all along. As far as I know, no other tool has been able to do this with the relatively ease of use as the blog. If I were able to blog my rationale for the Social Justice web site or have the children and their parents blog about the "Food Pantry", then side by side with them, we could discover, reference, hyperlink and construct mental models in ways that were never possible before.

Some Further Information on the Cognitive Flexibilty Theory

Cognitive Flexibility Theory
Implications for Teaching and Teacher Education
http://www.kdassem.dk/didaktik/l4-16.htm

Cognitive Flexibility Theory (R. Spiro, P. Feltovitch & R. Coulson)
Cognitive flexibility theory focuses on the nature of learning in complex and ill-structured domains. Spiro & Jehng (1990, p. 165) state: "By cognitive flexibility, we mean the ability to spontaneously restructure one's knowledge, in many ways, in adaptive response to radically changing situational demands...This is a function of both the way knowledge is represented (e.g., along multiple rather single conceptual dimensions) and the processes that operate on those mental representations (e.g., processes of schema assembly rather than intact schema retrieval)."
http://tip.psychology.org/spiro.html

Constructivist literature
The Constructions section provides an overview of constructivist literature Welcome to my pages on Designing a Constructivist Multimedia Curricula. and how such literature can be applied to a curricula design.
http://www.edb.utexas.edu/mmresearch/Students97/Rutledge/home.html

Spiro's Cogntive Felxibility Theory
A Graduate Presentation of the theory
http://www.fhsu.edu/~ggiebler/WebProj/Cft-Modified/TitlePage.htm

Why Technology for Social Change?

What will technology afford this project that other mediums will not?

I think using computers and specifically the web tools of a web site and a blog offer the following affodances:

• The ability to hyperlink text and ideas.
• Being able to present information with video and audio so that it is not solely text based and appeals to multiple intelligences and learning styles.
• For the use of the blog, it will a way to involve the parents intellectually in our social justice project, with relative ease of use.
• To have an online source of information from which to draw - easily accessible to faculty, students and parents.
• Blogs will be easy to update and post information quickly.

Why use Technology for Social Change?

Specifically, I think the technology of blogs present an opportunity for a democracy of ideas. I think blogs could possibly be used to bring about social change and this project will be an attempt to explore whether this is a valid supposition of not.

The Web Site will give all those involved a chance to look at relevant information concerning social jsutice and some common ground.

Faithful Citizenship

A Definition

As the author of this site on "Faithful" Citizenship, I felt it is necessary to provide some definition of "faithful" to my readers. I have defined citizenship elsewhere in this blog.


My definition of faithful:

Faithful - Being the best we are as people, in our relationship with one another and with the sacred or divine in our lives.

What "faithful" might mean in a Catholic Context:

Faithful in a Catholic context has a wide variety of meaning and can encompass thoughts from one end of the spectrum to another. Here's an example of Catholic Social Teaching at its best and in its extreme:

Just Peace - a site that is fairly objective about social teaching. You can't be sure how this site will progress. There are some tenants that would cause you to be aware and cautious. So, I don't hyperlink to this on my site.

Official Teaching - United States Catholic Conference of Bishops

SALT - A very good analysis of social justice. That's my opinion and I hyperlink to this site on my web site hoping that my audience will be challenged but not turned off. This site is published by a religious community so has some stability in that it's not the work of an individual. These people have worked in social justice for a very long time.

Call to Action - Call to Action (CTA) is a Catholic movement working for equality and justice in the Church and society. An independent national organization of over 25,000 people and 40 local organizations, CTA believes that the Spirit of God is at work in the whole church, not just in its appointed leaders. The entire Catholic Church has the obligation of responding to the needs of the world and taking initiative in programs of peace and justice. CTA acts as a nexus where the full panoply of Church renewal issues come into focus, intersecting and interacting to produce a vision of the Catholic Church as it can and should be. CTA promotes its vision of a progressive, engaged Catholicism through its acclaimed annual conferences, award-winning publications, extensive network of regional groups and joint programs with other Catholic renewal organizations. A good site but seen as liberal, so I can't link to this because of politics.

Using Blogs in the Classroom

Apart from yet encompassing this project on Peace and Social Justice, I would like to explore whether or in what situations, blogs can be used efficiently in education. Some of my expectations and motivations are:

• to see if blogs lend themselves to supporting cognitive flexibility.
• to encourage my students to write because their work will be published.
• to give the students a chance to experience their parents as writers and also be exposed to their political views in an educational environment.
• to encourage both the students and adults to locate and cite information, thus promoting research and using the internet for research.
• researching the data collection possibilities of a blog.
  

Some parameters for this blogging exercise:

• Posts will be directional, simple and allow for creativity/expansion of ideas.
• Posts and comments can be made in class and at home.
• A ;letter explaining what the blog's intention is will be sent home to the parents involved.

Evaluation of the blog will include:

• Posting in a timely manner.
• Adding to and contributing ideas.
• Adding other references to social justice.
• Writing ability-
• clear
• good spelling
• complete sentences

The Digital Natives of St. Mary's School - How Can We Reach Them Educationally

The children of St. Mary's School in grades four - six are active consumers and users of digital technology. Their interests range from internet sites that are entertaining to virtual communities( a special favorite of our sixth grade girls). They email and chat. They use cell phone and text messages. They (especially the boys from grades 2-6) love video games ranging from Pokemon to more complicated games, like Roller Coaster Tycoon. They are sophisicated and constant users of digital technology.
As an educator, I beleive it is imperative that our children integrate these tools into their educational structures. Learning does require discipline and a certain amount of motivation but why not tap in to our children's natural curiosity and use it for the sake of learning.

I ask you, Are our kids thinking differently? If you are Marc Prensky you may believe they are. Marc states that, ""Children raised with the computer “think differently from the rest of us. They develop hypertext minds. They leap around. It’s as though their cognitive structures were parallel, not sequential.” This parallel world, children need parallel tools to support their thinking and mental models. Some tools I have found helpful are:

• Kidspiration - allowing a child to make mental models of ideas and to think in a parallel fashion.
• Golly Gee Blocks - a simulatoin program using 3d figures. A great tool for representing concept like:
• Perception
• Directionality
• Recognizing and drawing with shapes
• Blogs - the verdict is out. Will blogs afford children with another way to think in a parallel world?

Our children deserve our best efforts. We are at a critical time in education and in our thinking process. Let's be there, with our kids!

Goals

The goals of this site are to:

1. Broaden the idea of Peace and Social Justice to extend beyond service projects and character formation.(This discussion is directly related to the reading of Westheimer and Kahne, “What Kind of Citizen?”)
2. To introduce two projects for social justice:
1. To continue our computer rebuilding project and digital access program - Towards the last three months of the the 2004-2004 school year, the Generation Yes students joined with Jeff La Tour to eliminate e-waste from the environment, to learn how to build computers with old computers that people donated to the school and to provide computers and access to children who do not own a computer. This project integrates our commitment to creating sustainable communities, to awareness of digital access and to creating a learning environment through hands on repair and building of computer systems.
2. Food Pantry and Blogs - We will be visiting and blogging about our food pantry in Ballston Spa. Some of the topics we will be researching are:
• The history of the food pantry
• graphs and charts designed by our Generation Yes students documenting the uses of the pantry, times when the pantry is low on stock
• when people are most in need of food
• an ideal "grocery list"
• some of the causes of poverty in Ballston Spa and some solutions.
• Parents and Teachers are invited to be an active part of this on line conversation that will seek an awareness of those in our midst who may be in need and solutions we can arrive at together in our local community.
3. To provide resources for the teachers for the school year 2005/2006 for classes they may want to use this year regarding our school theme. These sites were selected because they promote non-violence, respecting diversity, teaching generosity, learning to live with violence, and becoming part of a global community of caring (iearn).
• Peace Tools for Teachers
• Teaching about Diversity Lesson Plan
• Learning to Give
• IEARN
• How to Teach Children about Living in a World with Violence
• Peace Begins with Me
4. To Provide Sites that will provide reading material for both the parents and teachers of St. Mary’s School and also give them opportunities to participate in various social justice issues.

v Institute for Policy Studies

v Youth Noise

v Do Something.org

v Global Response

v Youth asE-Citizens

v Voices of Youth Social Development and World Peace Stop the Hate.org

5. To keep in mind the school’s commitment to caring that extends to social justice as it relates to the Earth and the circle of life. With this in mind, I have linked back to the Earth Site that I created last year and I added the Free the Planet Site.
6. To Assemble links to various Catholic Teaching on Peace and Social Justice – This is part of the web site because of the Catholic Identity of our school and to give the parents and teachers a feel for the best in our religious tradition.
1. Salt of the Earth
2. United States Catholic Conference on Social Justice
7. To promote an awareness of the needs of people outside the community of Ballston Spa, NY.
1. United Nation Millennium Goals
2. Millennium Villages Project

The Audience

The audience for the Peace and Social Justice Web Site is threefold:

The students of St. Mary's School in grades four, five and six - This site will present to them the idea of a citizen as a person not only of good character traits or a participatory citizen but also a person who addresses the roots of the problems that are cause injustice.
This is also where I will present to the children who will join the Generation yes Computer Clob what I have planned for the year. It will give them a chance to think about the projects, see if they have any ideas and decide whether they want to join.

The faculty and staff of St. Mary's School - This site will provide resources for the faculty to use with their students throughout the school year. It will also provide links that the teachers can use for their own reference.
The introduction is also written with the faculty in mind because it will broaden the theme of the Peace and Social Justice to systemic change. The perception of the theme presently focuses on character traits and service projects.

The parents of St. Mary's School - Our web site is viewed by many of the parents of our children. This year's theme is Peace and Social Justice and this site will introduce that theme to the parents and provide them with relevant reading, what projects I have planned for the Generation Yes club and give them a chance to learn how to blog. This is important because it gives the parents a chance to learn this new form of communication and it will give the children a chance to read their parents opinions on issues of social justice.