Lesson 1: What is Community to Me?

1. Community can be many different things and a combination or intersection of them.
2. Community is formed through family, friends, location, identity, and one's place in a larger global society.

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

1. Identify and explain the different communities in their life.
2. Reflect on what community means to them.
3. Start to think about and make a list of community members they would like to collect an oral history from later in the project.

1. Review student work on the Creating Portraits of Community online gallery, and select several examples to be discussed later in the lesson. Be advised that some student work talks about the effects of gun violence, opioid addiction, and mentions CASA, Autism, FASD, and human trafficking. Students selected their own subjects to feature and the content reflects their perspectives. Below are resources to help approach sensitive topics in the classroom:
   1. Talking to children after a traumatic event
   2. Talking about disability in the classroom
2. Review the following Project Zero thinking routines:
   1. Who Am I? Explore, Connect, Identify, Belong
   2. Unveiling Stories
3. Review the StoryCorps videos below or choose your own:
   1. Grandma’s Hands
   2. Learning To Fly: This Land
   3. Lessons From Lourdes: From the Fields to the Classroom
   4. No More Questions
   5. Sunday at Rocco’s
4. Review the mind map example.
5. Review the My Community History Project booklet to preview the oral history collection that will take place in lesson four.

Frame the lesson: The Creating Portraits of Community project is a celebration of your stories in conjunction with the 250th anniversary celebrations of the signing of the Declaration of Independence at the Smithsonian.

To highlight our community and help celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, you will use the skills gained in the following lessons to take photographs and collect oral histories of community members.

Now, let’s think about what community is.

Who are we? How are we all connected? What is community?

Frame the activity: We are going to look at the different ways community forms: through our immediate surroundings and our larger global society.

1. My Community:

Who am I?

Think about who you are and then about someone else. Consider how you have become who you are, where you belong, and what that can mean in our changing world.

Explore: Who am I? How has my identity developed?

Connect: I am connected to my parents, their parents and my brother and sister. I’m on the basketball team. Who else and what else am I connected to?

Identify: If I wanted others to know who I am, what would identify me? Do we have more than one identity?

Belong: Where do I think I belong? Do I have a sense of belonging to more than one group, more than one place?

Explore student work: Let’s now look at some student work from year one of the Creating Portraits of Community project. Instruct students to examine your pre-selected student works.

These works were created by middle- and high-school students that did the same assignment you will do. Each student chose what the focus of their assignment would be.

What would you like to ask them after seeing their work?

Frame the activity: After thinking about how your identity plays into community and seeing examples of your peers’ communities, let’s think of how our identities can connect us to others outside of where we live, our state, and even our country.

2. Globe as Community:

How are we a larger community?

Display the questions below on the board from the thinking routine Unveiling Stories. Instruct students to think about the questions while they are watching the StoryCorps videos.

Unveiling Stories

What is the human story?

What is the world story?

What is the new story?

What is the untold story?

Building a toolkit to create community portraits:

After hearing and seeing other’s stories and thinking about our own identities, let’s brainstorm things or people that mean a lot to us, or something we would like to learn more about in our community.

Who or what comes from your community and is important to you?

Who or what would you like to learn more about in your community?

On a piece of paper, draw a mind map. You can fill in the circles with words, pictures, or drawings. Start with your name in the middle and fill in the outer circles with ideas you came up with in the Who am I thinking routine. Then branch that out to things, activities, and people in your community.

Keep your map and continue to add to it until you decide who you would like to collect and document an oral history from.