Authorship 2.0

Here are some of the projects that my colleagues and I have done with middle school students in the context of global thematic units framed by essential questions and understanding goals:

Poetry Café
Students wrote, illustrated, published, and performed original poetry demonstrating a range of forms, such as haiku, rhymed verse, and free verse. They also created multimedia versions of their haiku, incorporating graphic design and audio recordings of the poems in their own voices.

Magazines
Students created original magazines, each comprising an individual portfolio of writing across a variety of genres. Students researched, wrote, and edited articles about local, national, and international news, science news, and “time travel” (historical) news, as well as editorials, book reviews, music reviews, and feature stories. Magazines also included math puzzles, advertisements, public service announcements, and other original content, and students designed the covers and layout for their magazines as well.

Children’s Storybooks
Students wrote, illustrated, and published children’s storybooks, which they read to younger students at a neighboring school. The setting for each story was a contemporary community of the author’s choice in a country outside the United States. Stories reflected aspects of the featured culture, and main characters were involved in solving a problem within the community.

Community Change Research
Students researched and reported on changes over the last three generations in the communities where they lived. Information sources included interviews with citizens who had lived in their communities for three generations, a variety of print sources, and non-print artifacts. Written reports and visual exhibits addressed changes in history, economy, environment, government, culture/society, demographics, a community problem, and another topic of interest to the author.

Time & Place Capsules
Students buried a time capsule that included representative artifacts and essays explaining why they selected each artifact to represent the group’s time (in history), place (on earth), and culture. In another variation, groups of students sent “place capsules” to peers in other schools, including artifacts, explanatory essays, and pen-pal letters. In return, they received similar “place capsules” from their counterparts in Taiwan, New Zealand, England, Anguilla, St. Thomas, and Brooklyn, NY (where many students were recent immigrants).

Book Clubs
Students participated in “book clubs” (i.e., literature circles), where they read and discussed novels in small groups. Students generated discussion questions and vocabulary study words, rotated roles in group meetings, and wrote interpretive essays about the books.

Romeo & Juliet
Students performed scenes of conflict from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. For their magazines, they wrote 16th century Verona news stories about the conflicts they were depicting in the play.

African Drumming & Dance
Students performed a traditional Liberian welcome song and dance (Fanga) with accompaniment on African drums, also played by students led by a musician parent.

Each project was featured at school-wide exhibitions of student work and assessed using customized rubrics. Other regular classroom practices included daily journaling, weekly learning reflections, and periodic student-led conferences involving review of portfolios and individual learning plans.