The Enabling Support Foundation

I have always been a big believer in making learning enjoyable. People who are more successful at their careers will often say that they enjoy going to work. People who job-hop tell me that they struggle finding a job that they want to do. If this is true of adults who are supposed to have a greater amount of self-discipline, it is logical to assume young students will also be more likely to learn more effectively when they are enjoying the process.

In the past, culture was handed down through both oral histories (entertainment) and hands-on practice of the related skills. Learning was not passive – it was engaging. In our current educational environment of “cost-effectiveness”, we tend to avoid the use of active learning. After all, to learn through experience, large classrooms and lecture halls need to be replaced with more intimate classrooms with the resources to re-create learning experiences. So how do you create learning experiences in spite of limited resources? How do you justify your choices to administrators forced to focus on “teaching to a test”?

To get things started, I want to tell of a teacher who I think was very creative. She taught forth grade in which the social studies curriculum emphasized geography. She was lucky enough to have a culturally diverse student body, and she used this to her advantage. At the end of each regional unit, the class would host a festival highlighting the cultures of that region. They would work on the festival throughout the unit with children from that region serving as “experts”. Being a very collaborative teacher, she also enlisted the help of the parents of the “experts”. A couple festivals bombed out. Parents were unavailable to assist, or the “experts” struggled following thru on their ideas. However, as the teacher became more experienced at facilitating these events, they became more diverse, enjoyable, and educating. In fact, her ethnic festivals became a school tradition – a part of that school’s culture. It is over twenty years since I spoke with that educator. I wonder if her festivals still occur.

So who is next? Who has facilitated (or participated in) a geographically- or historically- cultural learning experience? Examples can highlight low- and/or high-tech resources. How difficult was the experience to organize? How much collaboration was available and/or necessary? Most importantly, why do you believe this experience was a successful or unsuccessful way to expose learners to their culture and the culture of others?