An American Journey

A Global Citizenship Experience

The overarching theme of our learning experience, An American Journey, was Global Citizenship. Our goal was to educate students about the diversity of their peers and community at BMS by providing them an opportunity to see life experiences from other students’ perspectives and connect that to the past.

Using the Henrico Learner Profile, we created a cross-curricular experience connecting empathy to Global Citizenship, Quality Character, Critical Thinking, Collaboration, and Communication skills.

As Life Ready Learners, these students are now better able to contribute to solutions that address the needs of a broader community by building global awareness and demonstrating empathy, compassion, and respect for others through knowledge and understanding.

An American Journey (1).mp4

The Journey Begins

An American Journey, a cross-curricular experience, began with all the 7th grade English Language Arts classes participating in a lesson on the refugee experience with a focus on learning about empathy. Through this lesson, students created postcards to welcome our newest refugees to America. The students then had an option to submit their postcards in the StudentsRebuild campaign, which raises $5 per postcard towards refugee causes. A total of two hundred and three of our students submitted their postcards to this campaign and raised a total of $2,030.00 for this global project.

From this initial lesson, a larger cross-curricular experience that focused on the experiences of student immigrants and refugees came to fruition. First, one class of Level IV ELL students conducted research on refugee countries which looked at the country's history and reasons why people flee to other places. These classes created a virtual magazine showcasing their research and understanding.

Next, the 7th grade Honors ELA classes learned about interview skills, created interview questions, and practiced the interview process. A select set of students from those classes used their questions to interview immigrant students here at BMS about their experience immigrating to the United States. These interviews were shared with our school community.

In addition, the transcriptions of these interviews were then taken to 7th grade Honors History classes. They used both the BMS student interviews and historical interviews of early 20th Century immigrants to America to compare experiences. They went on to write comparative essays reflecting on the two experiences. 7th grade Honors ELA classes then used those same interviews and transcripts to create a persuasive piece on what makes our BMS immigrants courageous.

Finally, to connect all the pieces of these lessons and celebrate our Global Community, this website was crafted to showcase each of the lesson experiences so that it could be shared with all our community stakeholders.

Life Ready Learning

The overarching theme of our learning experience, An American Journey, was Global Citizenship. Our goal was to educate students about the diversity of their peers and community at BMS by providing them an opportunity to see life experiences from other students’ perspectives and connect that to the past.

Using the Henrico Learner Profile, we created a cross-curricular experience connecting empathy to Global Citizenship, Quality Character, Critical Thinking, Collaboration, and Communication skills.

As Life Ready Learners, these students are now better able to contribute to solutions that address the needs of a broader community by building global awareness and demonstrating empathy, compassion, and respect for others through knowledge and understanding.