4/12 – ELA Expeditionary Thursday Fieldwork

Students visited various writing workspaces (Mid Manhattan Library Teen Zone, Hunter College, City Tech, Brooklyn College, Teachers College) to participate in scavenger hunts, to interview people on site, and to create brainstorms from their interviews and novels about coming-of-age experiences. They returned to school with completed pre-writing for their upcoming PBAT papers.

Students visited Kurt Hahn Expeditionary Learning School (who partners with the NYC Immigration Coalition) and participated and interviewed student experts and local residents on the crisis in the Dominican Republic. Students then returned to school to make presentations of their learning.

Students explored the concept of moral dilemmas, or in other words, the choices people have to make that never have an easy answer. The concept of the moral dilemma is a central topic that centers around the characters in the short stories the students are reading with Phill and Steve or the characters in Frankenstein that they are reading with Dwight. These concepts can be fun when we can think about them when there are no real consequences to face, but these are choices people make every day that at times puts their morals into question and have drastic consequences on those affected by those choices, no matter which side they choose. Students will be given some fictional moral dilemmas where they will have to analyze the consequences and make a tough choice and then they will look at some real moral dilemmas that people in our community have to face and find out what they feel about those choices by interviewing them in different neighborhoods.

After studying the Syrian Migrant crisis in class by watching videos and reading narratives, students visited the Museum of the Moving Image to watch how Charlie Chaplin addressed the issue of immigration in the early 20th century. Students then toured the galleries, including the latest Jim Henson Exhibit, to see how artists throughout the history of film have used the art form to advocate for social justice.