The Tiny-House Project: Creating Agents of Change SUNG HEE KIM
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an we teach 6-7 year olds to be agents of change? This was the question on our minds as grades K-2 embarked on a service-learning unit exploring homelessness in September of 2018. The initial goal of the unit was to teach empathy and perspective-taking as a vehicle for social competence.1 However, out of the lessons emerged rich opportunities for developing resilience, metacognition, creative problem solving, mechanical engineering, feedback loops, and above all, teaching students to turn empathy into action. We chose to visit the the National Building Museum’s exhbit on eviction to explore how losing one’s home could make us feel and change our lives. Prior to the trip, teachers introduced the concepts of eviction and homelessness in their
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classrooms. The unit was augmented with a project in which each class would design and construct a home for a different fictional homeless family. Students had to “get to know” the homeless families and imagine their needs as they designed their living spaces, creating an opportunity to practice perspective-taking and empathy. I provided materials and information and facilitated discussions to help them “get to know” their family. It was the first graders’ job to design and build a fitting home for an environmentally-minded homeless family of four. To this end, students had to distinguish between their existing mental models of homeless people and an actual homeless family. This entailed in-depth metacognitive efforts, which I scaffolded for the first graders, to help us examine and revise the pre-exist-
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