In Grade 8, an Interdisciplinary Look at the Welfare of Dominican Children

Field inquiry, conceptualization of the problem, dissemination of results: Carol Morgan School’s Grade 8 PBL team cuts its critical teeth on a worthy subject (photos: CMS).

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As part of our ongoing integrated Problem-Based Learning (PBL) units, the Grade 8 students at the Carol Morgan School (CMS) in the Dominican Republic chose the topic, “How Can the CMS Community Support the Rights of Children in the Dominican Republic?” and worked on the issue through all of the disciplines.

This culminated in a student-written and -produced drama production, followed by a “Solutions Fair” to which the general public was invited. Samples of how each discipline contributed include the following:

Social Studies

The Social Studies class was where the foundation was built for this PBL Project. It all started by beginning with the end we had in mind. We received training in research and data gathering, and evaluating and citing sources, from our media and literacy specialists.

Students demonstrated their knowledge of the topic by producing a short report focused on the issues and existing solutions that are specific to the Dominican Republic (DR). Students used their increased knowledge about the issues to develop and enact solutions.

The highlight of the learning came when students engaged in the collaborative process as detailed on the rubric. This was a process that took them from being timid and unsure about connecting with the world outside CMS, to confidently working with local and global organizations.

Letters and emails were written, and phone calls were made. Teams volunteered, interviewed, and organized. Parents became involved and helped deepen the experience. The motivation for doing the work shifted from extrinsic to intrinsic.

Science

Students in science class studied the science of race and the biology of gender. For the science of race, students understood that there is no scientific basis for the term “race.”

The idea of race is a social construct that has evolved over time to justify various social and political ideas and behavior. For the biology of gender, students studied how gender is determined. They were shown that globally, female children are deprived of basic nutrition, opportunities for education, and employment simply because of their gender.

Language Arts and Spanish

In Language Arts class, students were exposed to children’s rights-related videos, articles, and true stories. Class discussions addressed the following topics: statelessness, child labor, sexual exploitation, and education and poverty. The culminating activity was a narrative poem told from the perspective of child denied basic human rights.

Lessons emphasized developing knowledge on the PBL topic and increasing vocabulary in order to formulate solutions, alleviating the problems that children are facing around the globe. In their Spanish classes, they wrote metric poetry based on true experiences of struggling children that they researched.

Health

In the Grade 8 health classes this year we started with the question, “What do you think are the biggest health issues among children in the DR?” Students were given the question to ask their nannies, drivers and parents. Groups then chose an issue/problem based on the various answers students received, and were asked to create a Public Service Announcement (PSA) in flyer form, to help inform the CMS community of these health issues/problems.

Technology

Today’s students not only have much more information to deal with, they also have a greater number of tools with which to organize their research, and a large online community that can be used for collaboration. A great focus was put into the PBL on teaching students not just how to research and cooperate online, but how to research, organize, and cooperate effectively.

Here is a sampling of the technology tools that students used during the research process:

- Moodle. Our launching place for the PBL, the Carol Morgan iLearn website serves as the repository for our courses. Basically a customized course in a box, we are able to put all relevant course documents online, provide links to important resources, and, most importantly, have real online communication.

- E-mail: All students have a CMS e-mail account, and were asked to make use of it during the course of the PBL.

- Googledocs: We used this not only to share some course documents, but also as a meeting place for multiple students to edit and work on the same document. Rather than e-mailing a document and then waiting for edits and responses, students share access to a single document.

- Ebsco and Webpath Express: Subscription online databases providing juried sources.

- Turnitin.com compares student work with previously produced written work, and generates an “originality report.” Although useful for detecting plagiarism, it is even more useful in reminding the student to properly cite the sources used.

- Noodletools provides a convenient location for both annotation and citations of research sources.

- Yippy helps organize research by giving results listed by category.

Mathematics

Our mathematics contribution included a statistics unit, which covered all measures of central tendencies as well as displaying collected data in the form of circle graphs, histograms, and box and whisker plots.

Drama

Monologues based on true experiences of children who are struggling with issues of statelessness, child labor, sexual exploitation, health, education and poverty were woven into a dramatic production with the videos of the poetry from their Spanish and Language Arts classes playing at the beginning.

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