A Meeting of Minds, Culture, and Penfriends!

In this cross-cultural project with students in North Carolina and Slovakia, our students are paired with a penfriend based on shared interests. The NC students wrote letters, but penfriends will get to know each other through electronic correspondence, as well. So each class can get to know something about our towns, we exchanged videos made by others about our cities – we sent the introduction to Greensboro sent by a local college. After these introductions, we are making our own films about our school and community using Centropa’s model of using photographs to tell a story – in this assignment, students will think reflectively about the audience and purpose of the film, and how to build a cohesive narrative. In the final assignment, students in each school investigate the local history of the town. Greensboro students will travel to the International Civil Rights Museum in Greensboro and use this assignment as a central focus for our unit on Civil Rights.  They will create multimodal presentations for the Slovakian students, and become teachers, and Tatiana’s students will do the same. Our classes are photo journaling the entire process so we will have a visual representation of this journey our classes travel together this year.