Conference

This past Saturday, the 22^nd of November. I attended the National Conference for Social Studies at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. This conference is a national conference for teachers of Social Studies and History for middle school and high school teachers. I attended a few seminars about implementing different lesson plans in the classroom as well as a keynote speech on immigration by Jose Vargas. The first seminar I attended was on teaching the Hunger Games in the classroom. Unfortunately I have never read the book or seen much of the movies but I knew enough about the story line to keep up with the discussion. We talked about the different themes such as equity, injustice, social uprising and types of government that can be translated from the film into the classroom. What I was able to pull away from this seminar was that popular culture can be a great way to engage students in the classroom. Throughout my time at RIC we have discussed the importance of connecting our lessons to the daily lives of our students and the Hunger Games is extremely popular among young people today and being exposed to broader themes of social studies through the lense of a popular book or film is something I will defiantly explore when I step in front of my class. The women presenting showed the attendees different role playing activities to use in the class to discuss inequality, and economics. In one activity we were split into groups and given a bag of resources and then asked to trade with other “districts”. After we talked about how this lesson plan can be used to teach not only economic trade but the importance of resources in geography.

Another seminar I attended was the keynote speech. Jose Vargas, an undocumented immigrant and Pulitzer Prize winner discussed his experiences growing up in the school system as an undocumented student as well as a homosexual male. What was important as a teacher for me to pull out of his talk was the difficulty many immigrants face in obtaining a college education. Vargas used a powerful image to describe what it is like for a student who is an immigrant. He talked about it being like being trapped in a pitch black room and that in order to illuminate the room he needed the light from others to support him. Such as his principle, and super intendedent who knew he was undocumented but did all they could to make sure he was able to go to college. The support system that is needed for students who are from other countries or have parents who are immigrants is critical to their success. This was the most powerful point I drew from listening to this speech is that in order to better serve all types of students we as educators must be willing to go the extra mile to secure their path towards a better future. Vargas would have never made it to the platform he is today if it wasn’t for his teachers and the people who understood that he needed more support than his classmates even though intellect wise he was smarter than most of the kids in the class. The system works against these “DREAMers” and as an educator I will not be blind to that fact.

The third and final thing I pulled away from this conference is many lesson plans and tools I came across in the exhibitor hall which was basically hundreds of publishing houses, travel agencies, and companies trying to sell their education resources to the attendees. Of course many of the people were trying to sign you up for something but I was exposed to a lot of possible tools that I could and will use in the classroom. For example one of the booths was a company that provided educational online programs that focused on historical figures in a different light. They were focused on teaching students the “essence” of key people like Ben Franklin, and Martin Luther King Jr. as a way to better teach students the large scope of the influence of these figures rather than making them memorize dates. In one activity there was a slide show asking the participants to guess whether or not the quote was from Ben Franklin or not. What these quotes dealt with were the large persona of Franklin rather than specific events in history. His views on slavery, taxes, humor and government were all touched upon in the quotes and the activity hit the analytical levels of thinking rather than the remembering level, I would very much like to use this type of strategy to supplement a lesson plan because it seemed to be a more qualitative way of gaging whether a student truly understands the values of the person they are studying.