Stories of Resilience 2019 

Please click on the portraits below to see biographies of staff and community members written by ELD/ELA 2 students from Sequoia High School.  

Information about Stories of Resilience: 

ELD/ELA 2 students interviewed Sequoia staff members,  Sequoia Union High School district staff members, staff members from the Boys and Girls Club and an alum of the ELD program about their lives and how they have overcome obstacles. 

Students prepared for this project by reading biographies about multiple historical figures who have encountered and overcome obstacles. They also learned how to take portraits. 

 Students used voice typing and audio during the interviews so that they could refer back to the interview. Also, they took notes while listening.  After completing the interviews and taking photographs of the interviewees, students wrote a short biography about the person they interviewed and described obstacles they have encountered and the resources they leveraged in order to overcome these obstacles. Students also wrote a short reflection about their learning.  Students have displayed their work (photograph with text) on their websites for the class. The website has different tabs for different projects completed this year.  

Please note that students used sentence frames to draft their work. In addition, I provided an introduction that students could modify slightly since I have not taught the students how to write introductions for essays yet.  Student took the portraits themselves or with classmates with a couple of exceptions. 

Many thanks to all the people who took their time to be interviewed and also to our collaborators on this project:  Araceli Alcibar Gayosso, Dreamer Specialist at the Boys and Girls Club, Allison Hyde, Bilingual Resource Teacher, Katherine Ruiz, Instructional Associate, Carol Lopez, Instructional Associate, Betsy Snow, media specialist, Barbara Reklis, district instructional coach, Chris Panero, ATLAS volunteer and Nancy Crampton, ATLAS volunteer.

If you would like to know more about this project or about project-based learning in ELD classes, please contact Stacy Wenzel at Sequoia High School. swenzel@seq.org.