{"data":{"ID":979,"Class":"Conversation","Created":1572287171,"CreatorID":79,"RevisionID":null,"Status":"Accepted","Title":"My Voice Matters: Building Authentic Engagement into Middle School Advisory","Handle":"my_voice_matters--building_authentic_engagement_into_middle_school_advisory","ShortDescription":"Let\u2019s explore ways of bringing authentic community engagement into Middle School. We\u2019ll share strategies from a Philadelphia advisory class where a student-centered, inquiry-driven service project provides a yearlong framework for building classroom community, exploring and addressing social issues and creating space for empathy and problem-solving skills to emerge.","Description":"Conversation facilitators will share from their own Philadelphia-based experience using Need in Deed\u2019s My Voice framework for service-learning as a powerful tool to help middle school students recognize that school is relevant to their lives and creates meaningful opportunities for educators to demonstrate ways of valuing students\u2019 perspectives and experiences outside of school.   Facilitators will have a wide range of examples to draw upon with an emphasis on the ways a student led service-learning project meets the goals of an advisory setting--creating a space for students to build community and feel heard and known. \r\n\r\nOur conversation will begin with a brief overview of the My Voice framework (adaptable to a wide range of settings) with a hands-on modeling of an activity (analyzing photographs as texts)  that educators can use to generate conversations with students about social issues that students care about. We\u2019ll explore ways to use this (and other related activities) as a catalyst for building relationships with students as well as creating authentic learning opportunities for students to explore the complexity of social issues--learning about root causes as well as the effect--and designing a project to address an authentic need in the community.\r\nWe will build in time for participants to brainstorm together ways of adapting the My Voice framework (or elements of the framework) to address challenges they may have in their own settings.  Copies of sample activities and photos for conversational prompts will be made available on a Padlet site for future reference.","Link":["https:\/\/www.needindeed.org\/service-learning\/"],"Audience":["All School Levels"],"Practice":"The conversation will include an interactive activity using a Gallery Walk that encourages conversation about social issues in the community. \r\nThink-Pair-Share protocol will be used to reflect on ways of adapting the activity (and the My Voice framework more broadly)  for a range of settings. \r\nRecognizing that younger students may benefit from norm setting and conversational strategies to guide respectful discourse, facilitators will provide sample sentence stems as a takeaway for use in classrooms.\r\nFinally, we\u2019ll use a Padlet to share photos and sample prompts and invite participants to add photos or conversational prompts that would inspire students to reflection and action.","Presenter":["Pam Prell","Sarah Duenas"],"PresenterAffiliation":["Need in Deed","SLA Middle School","Philadelphia"],"PresenterEmail":["pam@needindeed.org","Sduenas@philasd.org"],"ScheduleSlotID":140,"ScheduleLocationID":8,"SubmitterID":79,"AdditionalComments":"While the sample project will highlight the integration of service-learning in a current middle school advisory setting, we are prepared to discuss examples,  benefits (and challenges!) of using service-learning as an engagement strategy in a wide range of settings as the core values of student inquiry, authentic learning, reflection and problem-solving are deeply rooted in the model.","LiveChannel":null,"Hashtag":null,"VokleID":null,"RecordingURL":null,"ConferenceID":9}}