A Common Humanity--Acceptance, Tolerance & Inclusion

The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center is a 158,000 sq. ft. education center and interpretive museum located on the site of the Antebellum community, known as “Little Africa,” on the banks of the Ohio River in Cincinnati, OH. Using storytelling and first-person experiences, the Freedom Center draws meaning from the historical narrative of the Underground Railroad, and its lessons of courage, cooperation, and perseverance, to inspire a new generation of change agents to take action against contemporary injustices, wherever they exist.

Our unique approach to lifelong learning blends scholarship and educational technology in a way that achieves new contexts for teaching and learning 21st Century Skills—Creativity & Innovation, Critical Thinking & Problem Solving, Communication, and Collaboration—and facilitating Digital Citizenship.  Through our relationship with SAFARI Montage we are able to provide SAFARI Montage users with our video content and now through HD Network we are excited to provide some curriculum to support its use in the classroom.
 
Listening and Questioning for Student Discourse
The accredited “Four C’s”-Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Creativity and Communication-skills for learning within an information landscape, advances student empowerment for academic and personal growth. The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center (NURFC) empowers learners by placing them at the center of their own learning experiences and equipping them with tools for creative exchange of communicated ideas about the world around them. NURFC’s powerful blend of digital video scholarship, commentary about key facts, thematic issues, and enduring lessons taken from freedom struggles, past and present, assists in engaging students in substantive and thoughtful discourse. Discourse for discussion and debate of social issues within a democratic setting.

Listening
Constructivist listening for active engagement is strategy for student sharing allowing for the receiving, sending and communicating of ideas, thoughts and reflections. New and extended meanings are constructed through both cognitive and affective processing evidenced in expressed feelings and creative responses within an environment of sincere interest, caring, and acceptance of both listener and talker.

Students working in “dyads” (two people listening to each other within an allotted equal time to talk) create meaningful dialogue to express their individual thinking that when combined with the thinking of other students, promotes shared understandings, visions and learning commitments. During the constructivist listening dyad, the listener does not interpret, paraphrase, analyze the words of the talker, nor give advice, impose personal story, criticize, complain, or forfeit confidentiality. Due to this criterion, constructivist listening lends itself to discussion of both sensitive and complex issues.

Questioning
Questioning drives the process of thinking. Questioning generated by both teacher and student begins the process of thinking. Thought-stimulating questions lead to additional questions for yet deeper thinking.

Deeper, critical thinking develops the powerful inner voice of reasoning. Socratic Questioning is strategy to drive critical and engaged thinking through the asking of questions. Strategy to further probe additional presupposed questions in the pursuit of acknowledging connections for fostered assertions and essential insights. Strategy also purposed for identifying misconceptions and contradictions, and for inferring implications and consequences. Teachers pose prior generated open-ended questions essential to providing structure and focus to a lesson. Purposeful pauses of wait time are applied to allow for mental processing of creative and flexible thought. Inquiry is generated from the invitation for further student-generated questioning. The ultimate goal, a shared learning experience in which the teacher becomes student, and the student becomes teacher in efforts to know more.

Writing
A Collective Position Statement is strategy that engages students in collaboration and consensus building in development of reflective statements representative of their thinking and reflections. A student, upon viewing a video, records an individual statement inclusive of main ideas and important details that is shared with a partner or small group team. Students then renegotiate their statements for commonalities and proceed to format a new statement reflective of collaborative and collective thinking. The process may continue as student groupings continue to merge, renegotiate, come to consensus and form a new statement leading up to a whole group statement that captures the collective thinking of all students. The final statement is used to prompt additional critical thinking as further class activity continues.

Quick Write is a literacy strategy that allows students the opportunity to quickly capture their thoughts on paper and reflect on their learning. Writing strategy for student use and implementation at the beginning, middle or end of a lesson to prompt or summarize critical thinking. Students write for a short duration of two to five minutes to address idea, text or imagery from readings or viewings. The process aids the generation of deep thinking through stimulation of prior knowledge for assimilation of newly presented information. Quick Writes also aid in student self-evaluation of their degree of understanding for monitoring their own learning abilities.

Making use of NURFC Digital Media video segments, listening structures and questioning for in-depth discourse, students examine and come to understand the intricacies of the human experience as evidenced in challenges for freedom, justice and human dignity.
 

Please click the link below to access a multi-part lesson from the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center for use in your classrooms.

A Common Humanity--Acceptance, Tolerance & Inclusion

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