SUNG HEE KIM

The Tiny-House Project: Creating Agents of Change

SUNG HEE KIM

Can 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 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

ing thoughts we held about the homeless.

After learning about different homes, the first graders chose to build an eco-friendly tiny house for their family. We studied typical features of tiny homes such as water tanks, wall heaters, storage and composting toilets. Since space in a tiny house is limited, we also studied space-saving multi-use furniture. Together, we designed the layout of the house and sectioned it into various living spaces. Individually and in pairs, students chose to design and construct each living space. Their task was to solve the problem of how to engineer fixtures, appliances and multi-use furniture in the most space-saving yet usable way, while keeping the needs of the family in mind. In December, after having created initial blueprints for each of their sections, we headed to the Building Museum where they created their first 3-D models using recyclables.

After building the models, we visited the eviction exhibit where, among other things, first graders learned about the three main reasons why eviction is on the rise in America, as stated in the exhibit: lack of a living wage, rising rent, and fewer government programs for low-income people. We looked closely at an image of a family being evicted, whose belongings were piled on the ground with some boxes already loaded into a moving van, and used thinking routines to slow students’ thinking down, help them be great observers, and absorb the many details. Next, the students had the image explained to them in context. Finally, each first grader was asked to step “inside” one of the people within the image and speak from their perspective, revealing what that person feels, knows, and cares about. Students made powerful connections with the individuals pictured, showing deep empathy and understanding of the situation.

After leaving the exhibition, students chose to sit by a large ornamental water fountain when asked to pick a “safe space” in the great hall. When invited to share their thoughts and feelings, students expressed sadness about the plight of the tenants who were evicted. They said they were worried about future evictees, how they would fare, and if they would ever find a home. Their honesty allowed me to help them sort their feelings and address their concerns, while also validating their experience with purpose and relevance. It helped the children to know that while the exact timing of an eviction might come as a surprise, its imminence is often known by the tenants who could then possibly arrange temporary housing for themselves. Upon reviewing the three reasons for the eviction crisis as cited by the exhibit, students deemed them as unfair and due to a lack of caring on the part of

landlords, employers and the government.

Then we became metacognitive again as we examined our thoughts, separating our feelings from what we know. We determined that our goal in visiting the exhibition was not to leave saddened, but to become strong and walk away feeling resolute about learning how to care for people less fortunate than ourselves; thereby, growing up to be adults who will make the world a better place. Helping the students differentiate their feelings and distinguish them from their thoughts allowed them to use their cognitive abilities to manage a stressful situation and make an inspired determination about their future path. 2 While their empathy provided motivation, their new-found knowledge gave them direction. And their ability to balance this mix of empathy/emotion and thoughts/knowledge as their day unfolded was helped by the prior knowledge we had built together in class beforehand. One student said, “I want to try to bring the rent down so people don’t get evicted.” Another said, “I want to change it so when poor people don’t have enough money and rent gets higher, the government helps fill the space!” Students understood that if one sees injustice in the world, one can take action. First graders pumped their fists in the air galvanized to become change-makers!

This positive energy carried over into the next few months and into the spring as students worked tirelessly to build the best possible home for their homeless family. Students were driven to improve their chosen living spaces, deciding to create four thoughtful iterations of their tiny house sections using peer-generated feedback loops. In addition, the natural spacing effect and interleaving created by putting the project aside for a while, then revisiting, reviewing and revising over a period of time, together with the accumulated effort of practicing the presentation process had a powerful effect. By the time the first graders completed their tiny house sections and presented them at the whole school assembly in May, they spoke and fielded questions with expert knowledge and confidence, because their ideas and work had been rigorously challenged over the course of months by their peers.

While the tiny house we built was of a small scale, and the homeless family a fictional one, the students’ strong desire to help and the concrete actions they took with self-imposed rigor to solve a real-world problem was authentic. Through this unit, they learned they are not too young to be agents of change, and that if they see a problem in the world, they can do something about it. The students turned empathy into action and felt pride and exhilaration about their accomplishment. Empathy is a powerful emotion, and teachers can harness it to help students create extraordinary work. Remembering this feeling and the empowerment of having taken successful action could inspire an even bigger action in the future. One student voiced this thought as we gathered to debrief after the assembly, saying, “Maybe one day, we can do it for real.”

Sung Hee Kim (skim@saes.org; @sungheekim_ art) teaches First Grade at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School.