I feel like I learned so much about the term "revolution", and how to define it.  It's interesting all of the places/instances in which I feel mirror the process we read and spoke about today.  I think that it's important to allow time for organic discussion and fluid conversation to happen.  I appreciated the opportunity to learn from my group, and I really did learn quite a bit.  What a remarkable and accomplished group.

I am interested in the units, I almost wish teaching high school/college, I would appreciate a mature audience to discuss these themes and content.

We honor people by learning about them

It was a pleasure meeting everyone. I appreciated the discussion about the shortcomings of contemporary social movements in the U.S. and the theories presented on revolution and social change. These kinds of dialogues always leave me with more questions than answers, so I'll share some of them with you here:

• Are revolutions desirable? After all, revolutions are violent and often destructive for intellectuals and free thinkers. What are the underlying assumptions in our dialogue about the need for reform in our own country? In other words, what does change really look like? Always a difficult and important question to ask at an elite institution...
• As educators, how do we explain the role of the United States in Middle Eastern, Arab and South Asian politics? As a U.S. history teacher, this is a burning question as my students are puzzled by American involvement abroad. It seems that setting a solid foundation in geography and world history is a vital component that is often missing for students at the high school level. Is there a fast track to a global education? I realize this is a funny question, but the conditions in our public schools demand it. 

Finally, I have been thinking of the victims of the brutal hate crime at the Sikh temple recently. I came upon this link from Teaching Tolerance, and I do believe we honor people by learning about them: http://www.tolerance.org/blog/we-honor-sikhs-learning-about-them 

I had the pleasure to visit the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine for Sikhs in Punjab, India. It was the most spiritually rich place I have ever seen. This tragic event is a reminder of how vital multicultural and global education is for this country and the world. Teaching Tolerance has some great resources and articles, check it out if you have not already done so. Looking forward to working with you tomorrow!

This is my first experience with blogging.  It has been difficult.  Just getting internet access was difficult.  But  I hope this will expand my cyber experience. 

The first day's activities prompted new thinking about revolutions and the importance of  teaching our students about them.  I really like the Crane Brinton model for comparing the French, Russian and Chinese  Revolutions.

This morning session was awesome.  I particular enjoyed the free flowing conversation that followed this morning session.  I am delighted just to be a participant with my fellow educators.

As a side note, University of Penn is a very big and interesting campus.

Did anyone find the reading that high school teachers were to read, in order to help stimulate the conversation for tomorrow?  I found the elementary teachers' readings but no luck on any others.  Jerry

I can't believe how immensely frustrating it has been to get into the blog. I want to throw my computer out the window. It has taken hours.

So, aside from that, I found this morning's discussion stimulating. Our group discussions reminded me of how important it is to explore one's students level of prior knowledge before planning a lesson or a unit. Our three group members are now in the Harnwell computer center, trying to get all of us onto the blog, and we have agreed on a framework for our unit.

I was so impressed that we were able to take up the challenge of understanding and teaching about revolution so quickly today.  My students certainly don't dig in nearly as quickly!  I struggle especially with teaching topics related to the history of the Middle East, often because I sometimes feel as though I am prying open the students' minds and their hearts.  I want them open immediately!  When I think about the topic of Arab Spring(s) and whether or not I think it is a set of revolutions (finished, unfinished), I realize that this is some of the most important material that I have ever taught.  I certainly don't know if I can enable the students move from absorbing the information to acting on it; there seems to be a wide distance between those two verbs.  I am confident, however, that this week will give me the so-welcomed opportunity to move my thinking further along with respect to approaches.  I am also struck by the fact that this material requires students to confront their values, backgrounds, faith traditions, and other very personal features of their lives as young people.  What students each individually bring to the study of peace, conflict, revolution, as well as the regions where these episodes all occur, all combine to help shape how they take in this information. 

I seem to have lost the message I started, so here goes again.  Fascinating first day.  Just in case my first message is lost in cyberspace, I am, in reality, Ellen Davidson.  My name may appear as Elena Batdavid, a Latina/Hebrew blend that one of my daughters made up when setting up my gmail account. One of the fun aspects of having your own offspring as your tech assistants.

I was looking up a link for the the Blue Eye/Brown Eye model done in third grade. It's called "A Class Divided." Here's the link: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/etc/view.html

This entry is around what we need to do to make some of the underlying ideas of revolution accessible to elementary age children.  One of my commitments in teaching is to push and challenge my students, of any age, beyond what they think they can learn.  And just as clearly to help them embrace this challenge by making big ideas developmentally accessible so truly they can consider them.  One of these ideas is about unfairness and what happens with people who have been treated unfairly even for a day, no less for years and generations.  In addition to "A Class Divided" I explain some additional activities below.

I have a set of activities I do around economic unfairness. Some are classics. One that may be well known, I'm not sure, is a snack sharing activity where, in a classroom, one child gets an elaborate ice cream sundae representing the richest people, 5 or 6 each get an apple, representing middle class people who have enough but not a huge surplus, and then the other children each get a single raisin representing underfed people of the world.  You need to adjust these percents, and thus the actual numbers, to fit whether you are doing the world, the US, your community, etc.  This activity makes real unfair food distribution!  Lots to discuss after it and for days and weeks to come.

Another set of activities is also around resource distribution and not so inflammatory.  For example we do races where a few children run as fast as they can, a few run backwards, a few hop, a few have their ankles tied together and run that way, and a few aren't allowed to move at all.  As you might expect, one of the children who is allowed to just run usually wins the race.  Again you need to have the size of each group reflect what you're teaching with real world data. And the key here is also in the discussion.

 A third idea, also on unfair resource distribution, is an assigned project say to research a country, or perhaps to make a poster.  Children are assigned groups and supplies.  In the research project one group might have a stack of books as well as internet access down to a group that is only given a single dictionary or perhaps one book unrelated to their topic. With the posters some groups get colored markers, tissue paper, construction paper, scissors etc. down to one group that gets a white poster board and a pencil.

I do all those with children as a precursor to learning about one of the whys around revolution.

One of my favorite adult activities is "Star Power."  One time when I did this with a teacher group we took a bathroom break before we discussed, I went to the multi-stall bathroom and was in one stall where I heard two teachers talking in adjacent stalls. I couldn't see who they were but I heard one say to the other, "Now I know why there are armed revolutions."  Last year I taught this in a grad class and it was an incredibly powerful lesson on socioeconomic class. Students discussed it repeatedly for the whole rest of the semester.  Here are a few links, many more are easy to find.
http://www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/index.php?display_article=vn151starpowered
http://www.whatsrace.org/pages/starpower.htm