Escuela Whittier

The Zinn Education Project has been renovated. Middle School Students at Whittier Dual Language School use some of the curriculum.

The Health and Safety Assessment course at Whittier School was completed Wednesday 12/2 and the students helped the CCLCP interns create, administer, and summarize a health survey looking into the safety in and around Whittier School. The survey was given in electronic form to the Whittier 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students.

“Whittier Elementary School teamed up with University of Illinois at Chicago’s Chicago Civic Leadership Certificate Program (CCLCP) for Fall 2009 in an effort to address the health and safety conditions faced by the students. Two UIC CCLCP interns worked alongside Whittier staff and teachers to organize an after school program with 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students. The program met twice a week and involved discussions led by CCLCP interns on the safety hazards in and around Whittier and the ways that the hazards should be corrected. The product of the discussions became an electronic survey that the students of the after-school program helped put together. This survey was administered to all the Whittier 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. The results were tabulated and summarized into a powerpoint presentation. Whittier School staff, teachers, and students hope to use the results of this health and safety assessment to bring needed changes to the school and its surroundings for a safer environment for the students.”

Starting in November 2009, two CCLCP interns began meeting with students to work with them on creating a Health and Safety Assessment survey to be distributed to Whittier 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. The purpose of the survey was to get the students’ own opinions about safety around their school. The after-school program consisted of bi-weekly 1-hour meetings with the students. At the start, discussions were facilitated to prepare the students for the final survey. Discussions included topics such as “how do you see safety at Whittier?”, “draw a map of Whittier and mark any hazards”, and “what is a summary and what are ways of summarizing ideas?” From these discussions, students then began brainstorming on survey questions with the help of the CCLCP interns. After the survey was completed, it was administered electronically to the 6th, 7th, and 8th graders and the data was tabulated. The students’ next task became the summarizing of the data into tables and graphs.

Here is the Slideshow:

From Maestro Craig to staff:

ItAG Kickoff Night
January 15, 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM, Decima Musa, 1900 S Loomis
Meet the facilitators and other ItAG participants

Chicago’s Teachers for Social Justice is excited to launch Inquiry to
Action Groups (ItAG)– an opportunity for educators and their allies to build
community, access new resources, and link social justice with
classroom practices. ItAGs are small groups of educators, parents,
students, activists, teaching artists, and community members who meet
to share experiences, dialogue about readings, exchange ideas and
develop plans of actions. The goal of these ItAGs is to pursue a
common inquiry on a social justice topic and create an action around
this area of study.

2010 ItAG topics
* Hip Hop and Education, date TBD
Explore the intersection of Hip Hop and education for social justice.

* Arts and Education, Sundays from 12:00 to 2:00
Explore the connection between art and social justice.

* Social Justice in Early Childhood Education: Saurdays from 3:00 to 5:00.
Geared toward parents, early childhood teachers, childcare workers, and anyone with a stake in the education of young children, this ItAG will focus on ways to teach 2 to 9-year olds with an orientation toward social justice. As a group, we’ll collectively select topics, and our discussions will involve sharing personal experience as well as engagement with readings. Examples of possible themes include protecting a place for imaginative play in this era of testing, development of understandings of race, gender, and sexuality, advocating for early childhood workers, working with and standing by families, practicing nonviolent communication and rethinking classroom management and discipline etc.

* The Education for Liberation Movement: Sundays from 4:00 to 6:00
The Education for Liberation ItAG will be organized around some key questions:
Š What are different ways of thinking about education for liberation;
Š how have different authors written about it;
Š how has it been practiced in various parts of the world?
Although the ItAG members will decide what specifically we read (and do) and whether, for example, we’ll focus on critical pedagogy (i.e., what does this look like in my/the classroom), broader theoretical questions, or what it looks like concretely in the struggles in Chicago against R2010, we’ll start with reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of Hope, which repeats many of the themes within Pedagogy of the Oppressed, but puts them in historical context and is more accessible in many ways.

* New Teachers and Teaching for Social Justice: Saturdays from 10:00 to 12:00
Engage in a dialogue with experienced teachers about issues of social justice in education. Hear from a variety of perspectives, disciplines and grade levels.

Timeline
–January 15, 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM — ItAG kickoff event for all ItAG groups, Decima Musa, 1900 S Loomis
–January to March — ItAGs meet weekly for at least 6 weeks, usually for 2 hour sessions
–March 12 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM — ItAG finale event, ItAG groups come together to report back on their learning and actions
Please contact Jonah Bondurant at holajonah@hotmail.com and Sarah
Atlas at seatlas@gmail.com. Thanks!

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On October 30th, the middle school faculty sponsored a Halloween Social.

On October 31, the Whittier Dual Language Cross Country Team, performed with heart in the city tournament. At the City Finals in Washington Park and our runners did great. Jose (7th grade) finished in 8th place (out of the best 7th and 8gh graders 100 runners of the City) Christopher, 6th grade, finished 19 on the 5th and 6th grade division. Alejandro qualified to the finals but couldn’t make it due to an injury.Orlando Rodriguez was the team coach. Belated Thanks!

Students in the after school program are acting out a folktale with a positive message during a part of the yoga class. Looks like a lot of fun was had by all!

Whittier School staff members, Maria Catalan, Amy Clark, Zoila Garcia, Norine Gutekanst and Jill Sontag presented a 2 hour presentation at the 2009 Illinois Association for 
Multilingual Multicultural Education Annual Conference on December 9th, 2009.

Whittier is honored to be a part of the Chicago Arts Partnership
in Education’s Design Seminar Program. On Thursday, October 22,
Whittier hosted the first professional development for the
artists and teachers from all of the participating schools for
2009-10. Participants learned about the program from Arnold
Aprill, the Founding and Creative Director for CAPE. Scott
Sikkema and Mark Diaz led informational sessions and the
teachers then worked with Jessica Hudson, a dance and theater
artist to develop ideas for their units.

The Design Seminar Program is an introductory program which
allows CAPE to bring its methodology and philosophy of arts
integration, artist/teacher collaboration, documentation and
research strategies to new partnering schools and artists and
arts organizations. At Whittier, participating teachers include
Amy Clark, Gabi Chong, and Molly Cranch.

In preparation for our field trip to the Chicago International Children’s Film Fest, today we hosted a Poetry expert from Facet’s Multimedia. She spoke of the connections between Poetry and Film. The program that the Whittier Middle Schoolers will attend is titled “Reel Poetry.” We will see how well known poems inspired film makers to create movies based on the content of various poems. This field trip will be interactive and require our students to have parts of poems memorized; they will also be expected to recite poetry at the Facets Theater. The popular refrain from the day comes from “Invectus”:
“I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of soul!”

Our students did great once they overcame their shyness. Field trip will take place Oct.27.