TFIM teams reach out to peers and younger students with Hear Me! projects
Students participating in The Future is Mine (TFIM) at Steel Valley High School are using voice recordings to document the ways community service projects help them learn and grow. Clairton City High School’s TFIM team plans to record interviews with peers in their school’s Academy program as a means of reaching out to troubled youth. Both projects would be terrific learning experiences in and of themselves. But they’ll take on an extra dimension — communicating important messages to peers and adults throughout the region — because they’re being organized around Hear Me!
Steel Valley and Clairton were among a number of schools that shared their ideas for Hear Me! as part of a mid-year get together on Friday where TFIM advisors and student representatives gave progress reports on their three annual projects and began planning for their annual Student Leadership Conference. Just a few of the others outlining Hear Me! plans were South Allegheny High School, where TFIM members will help elementary students produce stories; Elizabeth Forward High School, where the TFIM team hopes to work with English teachers to engage senior class students in voicing their aspirations and visions for the future; and Thomas Jefferson High School where TFIM members want to reach out to freshmen to discuss the ups and downs of transitioning to high school so that they can share the observations with rising eighth graders. At the meeting, Jen and Jessica from the staff at Carnegie Mellon University’s Create Lab joined the teams at the offices of The Consortium for Public Education, which organizes and supports TFIM. They offered our advisors any help they need putting together Hear Me! projects and told them about tools teachers can access — including lesson plans —by registering on Tell-Port, at http://www.pghhear.me/ Jen also filled us in on some terrific story gathering projects that are going on elsewhere, like one at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History where teenage docents are collecting voice recordings from peers visiting the museum. A couple of our teams also reported on Hear Me! projects they’d already completed, including one at Pittsburgh Brashear High School where TFIM members interviewed students from their school’s English as a Second Language (ESL) program and another at Brownsville Area High School, where the team engaged fourth-graders from Cox-Donahey Elementary School in writing and drawing stories. Both of those teams plan follow-up activities. The Pittsburgh Brashear team plans to further engage the ESL students with a field trip to CMU’s CREATE Lab and the Brownsville team is organizing more activities to build supportive “big brother and big sister” relationships with the fourth-graders. Pam Gaynor