Immigration and Imagination

Mr. N is a recent graduate, who teaches language arts and global awareness in a suburban school district. Ms. O, a university friend, has also accepted a similar teaching position, but in a school primarily serving the children of recent African immigrants. Both share a concern about recent tensions between the native and immigrant cultures in their country. They decide to involve their students in a project that should develop both their students' fiction writing skills and their understanding of the issues related to immigration.

With a combination of laptops and tablets available in each of their classrooms, and new collaborative writing technologies appearing regularly, the students will be able to work together across classrooms in ways not possible just a few years ago. The students will be paired, one from each classroom. The pairs can also collaborate with students from other cultures, providing a powerful tool for building bridges between those cultures. For this project, Mr. N and Ms. O choose the collaboration tool Diigo, which can be used for free by the students.

The assignment students are given is:

"There are many issues today related to immigration in our nation, which evoke widely differing opinions. For example, some people believe that immigrants should adopt the local culture, while others believe that immigrants enrich the culture with new practices, beliefs, and foods. You and your partner will be charged with selecting a problem or issue related to immigration, particularly immigration from African nations. You will research the issue on the Internet and use collaborative writing tools to create a work of fiction that illustrates that issue. The storyline will familiarize the reader with multiple points of view on the issue and propose a solution to the problem. The solution can be based on an idea that you find as you research, or it can be one that you create yourselves. A list of starting points for your research can be found on the classroom Web site."

The student pairs, one native-born and one recent immigrant, each bring their own perspective to the story that they develop. At each of the classrooms, the teachers focus on supporting instruction in three key areas: non-fiction writing, elements of culture and cultural literacy, and immigration history. In addition, a key skill of global awareness is focused upon as the students interact: perspective consciousness. This skill, identified as a central component of global awareness, simply means that you have the ability to recognize and respect the perspectives of others, even if you don't agree with those perspectives. To support this instruction, the teachers have students read excerpts from the book, Conversations with Immigrant Teenagers, by Marina Budhos, and discuss the perspectives of these teenagers.

Students are provided with free, protected email accounts from providers such as Google or Gaggle. In addition, each pair sets up an account in the collaboration site Diigo and downloads the Android app for phones and tablets, allowing them to share their research with notes and comments on the fly, as well as to co-edit during the writing process.

After writing and peer-editing their works of fiction, the two classes create a Web-based journal of student writing. They use the Website builder Weebly for Education and they open it to other interested students.

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