Your Name and Title: Cora Bresciano, Co-Executive Director
School or Organization Name: Blue Planet Writers’ Room
Co-Presenter Name(s): Susan Gay Hyatt, PhD, Co-Executive Director
Area of the World from Which You Will Present: Florida, USA
Language in Which You Will Present: English
Target Audience(s): Teachers of Language Arts, Fine Arts, Social Studies, World Languages in grades 3-12; Teaching Artists; Cultural Organization Education Departments
Short Session Description (one line): Learn how an American class connected with a class in China by using an American folk art form to create an art-and-text story exchange, and learn about the benefits that this sort of project can provide to your own students.
Full Session Description (as long as you would like):
What’s a Crankie?? Using Creative Story Exchanges to Build Global Competence and Connect Students Across Borders
This past year, in an international collaboration led by Blue Planet Writers’ Room, elementary school students in Florida, USA and Shanghai, China taught each other about the places they live by creating “crankies”—an American folk art form that uses a wooden frame to hold a scroll of paper that’s “cranked” past an opening, providing a moving background upon which to set stories of all kinds.
In this session, we’ll explain how the teachers coordinated this creative project and how to replicate it with your own students. We’ll discuss how this project and other international story exchanges contribute to improved global competence and to the 4Cs of 21st century education: collaboration, creativity, communication, and critical thinking. We’ll also show how these creative exchanges can help students improve their reading and writing skills as well as their skills in the project-specific art form.
In addition, we’ll talk about how letting students craft and share their own narratives—rather than rely solely on outside sources for information about the world—can lead them to question biases and assumptions and to find common humanity in people from all over the world.
Websites / URLs Associated with Your Session:
www.blueplanetwriters.org
http://aclassroomodyssey.wordpress.com
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