I work as a primary grades teacher (K-3) in a Title I school. Approximately 60% of our students qualify for free or reduced lunch. Our students represent a diverse set of cultures, mostly Mexican- and Filipino-American. Our school is a unique public school that guides students to do projects and incorporate real-world, hands-on connections to their learning. Our learning has been online and distanced due to COVID since March 2020, and we are continuing to see the impacts this is having on our youngest learners and their families. On the bright side, research has shown that certain conditions can actually promote post-traumatic growth rather than post-traumatic stress syndrome (Jayawickreme and Blackie, 2014). My colleagues and I have developed a project that responds to this need:
Our project focuses on positive identity development, narratives of growth and hope, and self-love to promote student wellness and trauma recovery as they return to school after COVID. Students will conduct a six-week investigation of their identity upon returning to school in the fall, focused on six main identity markers: our hobbies and interests, languages that we speak, family structures/traditions, our cultures, our skin color and racial identities, and our gender identities and breaking gender stereotypes. The purpose of this project is to cultivate a deep sense of self-love and confidence that will sustain students as they navigate the post-COVID landscape, throughout their school experiences and even throughout their lives.
In order to cultivate this positive sense of identity and wellness, students engage in learning experiences across the content areas. In literacy, students will read books that show characters that share aspects of their identities as well as those unlike themselves navigating both difficult and joyful experiences. We will engage in whole-class conversations about the themes that arise in those books such as healing, diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, courage, hope, and action. Students will also engage in small group discussions of these texts and personal reflections in order to deepen not only their literacy skills aligned to Common Core state standards but also to grow their own personal well of love and care for themselves and others as we return to life post-COVID.
In math, students will learn skills and content that strengthen their mathematical identities as well as ties between their math and their cultures. For example, students make a family recipe that require them to measure, follow a process, divide portions, etc. thus supporting their growth in measuring, procedural thinking, and fractions. They also create a "recipe for me" in which they describe what ingredients make them up - including measurements! They learn about mathematicians that have discovered new math concepts or created new technologies that represent their identities and cultures. They even interview their families about their families' relationship with math and share their family "math stories" with their classmates. They will use math to reflect on their time in quarantine as well as their lives as we return to school, including counting, measuring time, documenting special memories, and more.
At the end of this project, students will create a portfolio of their work and reflections on their identities and experiences to share with their classmates and family members. They will include writings, drawings, reflections, and other work to summarize and showcase their learning about themselves and why they love themselves. Throughout this project, students will focus on the essential question "What parts of myself can I love?" and examine this question in the context of surviving (and even thriving) during and after COVID. In the portfolio, they share their own answers to this question and create narratives of healing and growth for themselves and their communities. Finally, they will create and present a public exhibition in which they share their learning publicly with an authentic, real-world audience. This project is necessary for my students because we are all experiencing extreme stress and uncertainty throughout the pandemic. Our students are disproportionately impacted by COVID as they are low-income and from communities of color. Furthermore, our school community stretches across national borders, with some of our students living in Mexico and some in the United States. As a result of COVID, our students have experienced personal loss as well as family separations as cross-national travel has been restricted or even halted during this difficult time.
As shared in Jayawickreme and Blackie's 2014 article, post-traumatic growth can happen when certain conditions are met. Post-traumatic growth means that people report personal growth after traumatic experiences, including signs such as "improved relations with others, identification of new possibilities for one’s life, increased perception of personal strength, spiritual growth, and enhanced appreciation of life" after a traumatic event. As one might imagine, post-traumatic growth can only occur if the resources are available to cultivate this growth during and after a traumatic experiences. Jayawickreme and Blackie summarize research on post traumatic growth that suggests that "deliberative rumination about the event, deriving meaning from the event, and social support are key processes in facilitating growth." This research is the foundation for our self-love and identity project.
As part of this project, our students will engage in "deliberative rumination" - ongoing and supported conversation about their identities and experiences, with a special emphasis on stories of growth, hope and love during and after COVID. They will be supported to derive meaning from their personal experiences, including their experiences in quarantine, to understand how their experiences and relationships help make them who they are. Finally, they will build and cultivate a social support network with their peers in class to support one another in writing a new collective narrative of healing, joy and hope as we navigate out of this pandemic and quarantine.
We are faced with an unprecedented challenge to support a cohort of children who have not been to school in over one year, who may be a year or more behind grade level standards, and may even have experienced personal distress or loss during this year. Our school community straddles the US-Mexico border, and some of our students and families live in Tijuana, Mexico. Due to border closures and strict public health requirements, students have been separated from their families members for months on end. Some students did not get to spend holidays with loved ones, and some have even lost family members to COVID.
As teachers, we must prepare to support children socially, emotionally, and academically as we return to school. For young children, returning to school will not be "back to normal" - it will be a radically new normal, especially for children so young that they do not clearly remember a time before quarantine and city-wide lockdowns. My colleagues and I are getting ready to get creative and use all of our resources and passions to ensure that we can support ALL students towards post- traumatic growth, not post-traumatic stress. The projected long-term benefit for our students and our school community is to heal and begin to grow back stronger after our experiences in quarantine and during COVID. Since social and emotional wellbeing is the foundation for academic success, this project will also support medium- and long-term academic outcomes for this cohort of students. Students will grow their positive identities and take time to reflect on what makes them special and what parts of themselves they can love. They will engage in positive relationship-building experiences with peers and family members, and they will share their positive stories of identity and self-love with the community. It is my hope that my students' journey and presentations of their positive identity development will inspire others in our community to reflect on their own journeys before, during and after quarantine to deepen our love for ourselves and others. Therefore, this project will contribute to post-traumatic growth and prevent post-traumatic stress syndrome in my youngest students.
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