Real-world Writing And The Peace Jam Club

By Author: Kathleen
Total Articles: 56
Comment this article

Just before Rachel's and my meeting with Maathai, five Kenyan MPs were killed in a plane crash, sending the government into a tailspin. Maathai cancelled her foreign trips, and we lost our golden opportunity. It was difficult buoying Rachel's spirits when I so acutely shared in her disappointment. Promising to drive her to New Haven if Maathai ever rescheduled, I suggested, as a last hope, that she investigate whether Maathai had any later stateside visits planned in the next year, even if they might be too late for her NHD revisions.

That is the day Rachel discovered Peace jam, an international service learning initiative for youth. The program was hosting Omega Replica Watches its tenth anniversary conference in Denver, Colorado. There would be ten Nobel Peace Laureates in attendance, including His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Rigoberta Menchu Turn. aathai had also been invited. Again, it sounded too good to be true, and I was still licking my internal wounds from the previous laureate letdown. I quipped to Rachel across the room that if such ...
... an organization existed, I would be a member already. But Rachel excitedly called me over to her computer screen and began to teach me.

The rest, as they say, is history. It is no longer all History Day, as I have handed a vibrant extracurricular History Club off to some far superior historians in the social studies department at my school. I continue to teach the NHD-themed research paper in my tenth-grade classes. However, I have replaced my primary extracurricular focus with a new Peace jam Club. Now I'm working with kids to learn about Nobel Laureates and to take action from their examples in the school, community, and world. In the mere two years of my engagement with this outstanding program, I've taken more than 30 kids to meet two different laureates, and have I met five. More importantly, the Peace-Jam Club Rachel Arnold founded, as a result of her authentic learning, has earned more than $5,000 and disbursed it at the local, national, and international levels to help create change and social justice according to priorities the club identifies.

Peace jam, as it works in my school, allows me to teach the full realm of English skills (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) to a diverse and inspired group of ninth- through twelfth-grade students. The students developed a pithy motto, "Who can make a difference? I CAN!" (I=information, C=caring, A=activism, N=networking). They run monthly informational events featuring outside speakers after school in the library. Guests have included the AmeriCorps coordinator for New Hampshire, an American journalist working in Columbia, the Director of New Hampshire Peace Action, a Holocaust survivor, and a Lost Boy of Sudan, among others. Typically, one student writes and delivers opening remarks and an introduction for the speaker, another composes a thank-you note, and multiple students design and color posters for the events. I have tapped confident writers to create brochures, write news articles, write grants to fund speakers, and submit grants to secure part of the $125 fee to attend the Tag Heuer Replica Peace jam Northeast Youth Conference. A small subgroup of students wrote a business plan and received seed money from Youth Venture to design and market Peace jam T-shirts with proceeds sup-porting micro-credit loans in the developing world. My Peace jam students become invested in authentic learning, and it pays off each spring when they meet and interact with a Nobel Peace Prize winner about real-world issues as a result of their purposeful writing and activism. More information on Peace jam is available.