Rebekah Engle, Niki Paul, Laura Carpenter
The idea for our project is to collaborate between high school Language Arts, Social Studies, and Health classes to create a community magazine with student feature articles, art, recipes, advertisements, etc depending upon student interest areas. We’re hoping to hook our students with the ideas of creative license, magazine ownership, and the outcome goals of of being published and being more informed community members. Throughout the project students will have a chance to locate, organize, and synthesize information from their local community.
Students will go on different community outings such as trips to local farmer’s markets, chamber of commerce, and local newspapers. From those experiences the students will collect and analyze the data and decide what content should be included in the magazine. Students will form groups based on interest areas and will be responsible for creating original content for their section of the magazine. They will collaborate with their group members on article content, taking their audience into consideration. Student groups will plan and manage their own sections of the magazine and work together to complete the project. They will use the writing process to pre-write, write, revise, and edit, and eventually publish the content to the web-based, student-created magazine. As an extension of the project we may have students partner with a local printing company to develop hard copy magazines to distribute through local businesses.
Each of the articles and magazine content pieces will be guided by a rubric and will be expected to be professional and publishable when finished. Assessments of student learning will be made by the teachers from writing drafts and final publishable pieces. The project should last approximately three weeks although there will be flexibility with the time frame if students find they need more time. They will work on the project in all three of their participating classes as well as going on community trips as a group. They will work mostly during the school day, rather than outside of class, although they will be able to collaborate outside of class if they wish.
Through this process we hope that students will gain a better understanding of their community, participate in their community in healthy ways, and become community contributors. We also hope our students develop as writers and become better consumers of media through their evaluation and creation of their own media content.
