POV's BORDERS GLOBAL CLASSROOM

As part of the educational component for our series, we would like to collaborate with several international schools to create a classroom project to discuss what the environment means to students around the world.


Partners

We are planning to introduce this educational project with help from a
number of educational sponsors including iEARN (iearn.org), tapped in
(ti2.sri.com/tappedin), an online workplace of an international
community of education professionals, and the Intercultural Email
Classroom Connections (teaching.com).

Goal of Project

The overarching goal is to use the Borders educational area to help bridge cultural gulfs or misunderstandings between teenagers in different countries and foster a global community of learning among young people, encouraging them to look at the planet as something that belongs to us all.

How Can You Participate?

We would like teachers to participate in the project sometime in January through March 2004. The Borders site will be live and updated for approximately 8 weeks during February and March. Teachers would be responsible for helping students to create stories, pictures, discussions, and contests around a series of lesson plans developed by our education team. Teachers would oversee the ongoing class projects and submit prepared content from their students to the POV Borders staff (via email or directly to the site) for upload.

We'll be distributing lesson plans in mid-to-late January. Sign up now to let us know that you are interested in learning more and we will be in touch in the coming weeks.

Participating cities/countries currently under consideration:

•  New York City, U.S.A. melting pot for environmental, resource, and population challenges for a first world country.



•  New Delhi, India. The capital of a burgeoning developing nation of over one billion people.



•  Copenhagen, Denmark. Scandinavians generally promote and run progressive conservation, recycling, and renewable energy schemes.



•  Wellington, NZ. This is another country with progressive green policies, using natural resources in unique ways. It has low population, and abundant space and resources.



•  TBD, Africa. A school from an English-speaking country within Africa or an ESL program, highlighting some of the great challenges faced by poorer, developing regions within the African continent.



•  Oaxaca, Mexico. English as a second language classes with high school students.



•  TBD, Spain. Old-world European living.



•  TBD, China. ESL high school students in the Yangtze River area.

Lesson Plans

Here's a sample of the types of activities we are planning for participating classrooms.

•  Tapestry of Life (visual storytelling): We will ask students to build a visually telling montage of their surroundings. This could translate to assigning classes to take pictures along with short written or audio explanations of their family refrigerator, car, garbage, favorite place to hang out, etc. with an eye towards the differences in environmental awareness these pictorial stories will provide. Each montage of images and comments uploaded to the POV's Borders website will grow during the site's live period and will create a unique and shared visual footprint for each of the areas the schools represent.



•  E-Pen Pal Board: Students would be encouraged to write about their own environments and contrast them with their perceptions of the environments of other participating students. For example, students in New York would write about what they think life is like in New Delhi or Africa and vice versa. Teachers would have students read essays from students in other classes and write essays about how they were wrong or right.

Ongoing Resource

As this POV's Borders installment will be live for 8 weeks in the Winter and then archived for future use, any teacher will be able to use the content provided by the original international classrooms as a jumping off point to engage their own students with lesson plans and activities provided on the site.

Other POV Classroom Resources

Visit our classroom area to find lesson plans, discussion guides and other materials you can use to present POV films in your classroom. We offer over 25 free lesson plans in a variety of subject areas — including civics, social science, health, literature, history and more — for download.

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