Introduction
For one moment, imagine the senses that are typically engaged for my students as they walk to school. Walking to Twain, you will see rows of single family homes and apartment buildings crowded into city blocks, streets choked by traffic and hundreds of other children that are making the same daily pilgrimage to school. You will hear noise. Horns honking as you cross either Central, Cicero or Archer Avenues, busy streets that are filled with cars making their morning or evening commutes. You will hear the sounds of planes taking off from nearby Midway Airport or might hear the sound of truck engines from the industrial park that is a few blocks away from the school to the north. You might smell the faint odor of chemicals, burgers being grilled at Burger King, or the sewage damp from the canal that is part of Chicago’s water treatment plant that is less than a mile away. You will feel the rhythm of urban life, how the neighborhood that my school is situated in slowly comes to life each day, everyone coming and going in their own direction with intention and urgency. This is not the place where individuals typically pause and wax poetic about the environment or feel connected to nature.
Mark Twain Elementary School is a Chicago Public School on the Southwest Side of Chicago. It is situated in a dense, urban environment. The student population consists of 906 students, of which 76.9% are considered low income. The population is also roughly 90% Latinx and 8% white with a small population of Polish speaking students. Students that receive special education services account for roughly 15% percent of the student population, and students that receive bilingual services account for another 21.7% of the student population.[1] This unit is designed for roughly 100 sixth grade general education students.
This unit complements the work that is expected of students in other units throughout the school year. I have recently engaged in a teacher inquiry project around the idea of noticing. This has been specifically focused in the areas of teaching and writing poetry. Through my interaction with both students and teaching colleagues, I have learned that it is critical to get students to notice the craft choices that authors make in order for them to consider their own lives and be able to employ some of the same techniques to write about their own experiences and perceptions of the wider world.
In my current practice, we start by reading and unpacking poems together through the process of close reading. We discuss the choices that writers make in order to organize their ideas, express abstract ideas, and respond to the things that they notice about themselves and the wider world. I have extended this practice into using accordion books where students can write their own poems using poetic frames from other poets, (literally) draw connections between ideas through creating imagery, and play with language. I have also curated song lyrics and short stories to get students noticing in the wider world.
This unit seeks to carry the work of noticing even further into nature. This is particularly relevant for my students given that the community that my school is situated in is surrounded by an airport, factories, an expressway and dense blocks of housing.
The unit will get students to consider what they can learn from nature by learning about how others have engaged with nature and benefitted from it in the past. Students will recognize that there is a long history of people turning to nature in order to be mindful and present. Just as Thoreau set up shop near Walden Pond or Carson gazed at the ocean, we will step away from the classroom on “Spirit Walks” to see what we might notice.
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