Creating a Virtual Immersion Experience
Understanding a complex topic like immigration in the United States takes time, effort, and multiple perspectives. From an educational standpoint, it's one of those subjects best served by a deep dive or thorough exploration or, better yet, through some sort of authentic experience. That is exactly what CA has provided for the past three years as part of our Freshman Intensive, a program which allows 9th Graders to be fully immersed in a topic like immigration for one full week in the school year.
Like many programs, this one will need to look different during the pandemic. Getting out into the community as we have done in years past is much harder this year, and traveling all the way to El Paso, Texas, as a group of students and teachers have also done the past three years, is unfortunately out of the question. So Daniel Lopez and I are trying out a virtual immersion experience. Partnering with our friends at World Leadership School (WLS), a longtime collaborator on student trips, we are offering our English and Global Perspectives classes a unique opportunity to learn about immigration through multiple lenses. After studying a few key immigration-related topics last week, and reading poetry and short stories as well, students heard from multiple guest speakers this week. We listened to the stories of border patrol agents, volunteers from Border Servant Corps, lawyers from the American Immigration Council, and finally two recent immigrants. All of these folks live and work in the border region of El Paso and Juarez, Mexico. Since we could not go to El Paso, El Paso came to us. Everything took place over Zoom of course, but the students did get to connect with people they would not have otherwise met and interact with two excellent and engaging WLS instructors.
Next week, students will summarize and capture what they learned through a creative project of their choice—a short story, piece of art, video, monologue, or a series of reflections. All of these possibilities are designed to build empathy and get them to really think about what it would be like to be in the shoes of an immigrant, or a border patrol officer, or an immigration lawyer or judge, or someone working to assist immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. While it may be hard to put our arms around the entire, multilayered topic of immigration, we can build our understanding of other people's experiences and learn from their stories.
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Like many programs, this one will need to look different during the pandemic. Getting out into the community as we have done in years past is much harder this year, and traveling all the way to El Paso, Texas, as a group of students and teachers have also done the past three years, is unfortunately out of the question. So Daniel Lopez and I are trying out a virtual immersion experience. Partnering with our friends at World Leadership School (WLS), a longtime collaborator on student trips, we are offering our English and Global Perspectives classes a unique opportunity to learn about immigration through multiple lenses. After studying a few key immigration-related topics last week, and reading poetry and short stories as well, students heard from multiple guest speakers this week. We listened to the stories of border patrol agents, volunteers from Border Servant Corps, lawyers from the American Immigration Council, and finally two recent immigrants. All of these folks live and work in the border region of El Paso and Juarez, Mexico. Since we could not go to El Paso, El Paso came to us. Everything took place over Zoom of course, but the students did get to connect with people they would not have otherwise met and interact with two excellent and engaging WLS instructors.
Next week, students will summarize and capture what they learned through a creative project of their choice—a short story, piece of art, video, monologue, or a series of reflections. All of these possibilities are designed to build empathy and get them to really think about what it would be like to be in the shoes of an immigrant, or a border patrol officer, or an immigration lawyer or judge, or someone working to assist immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. While it may be hard to put our arms around the entire, multilayered topic of immigration, we can build our understanding of other people's experiences and learn from their stories.
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