Inquiry Cycle: Identity and Values

As we continued our How We Organize Ourselves unit, we decided it was important for students to know themselves and how communities work. This is also connected to my work as the I Belong Facilitator for the Elementary School (a future post I imagine). We wanted students to understand conceptually that communities can be both physical locations where we live and also created from people who share similarities, especially in regards to their identity.

The route I chose to go for tuning-in is to a “mind map” of the students’ identities using only nouns: things they are, not things they like or adjectives to describe them. This idea comes from Sara K. Ahmed’s work (and from her book Being the Change). I had a chance to work with her for a few workshops at a conference in Bangkok that was focused on inquiry and she showed pedagogy and practical tips/activities to bridge between inquiry and belonging/inclusion. She is amazing!

Using only nouns for who the students are opens up more avenues for connection and community building.

For example, think of the difference between: cats and cat owner. The first student likes cats, that’s great! But does it link to who they are as a person or what they do on the daily. A cat owner has to feed the cat, take care of the cat, has many lived experiences with cats versus a student who loves cats might know from videos, books, a friend’s cat, etc. This is a generalization, of course, but it has a bit more bite to it that students have to think about who they are and what they do. We also do a heart map for writing where it’s just things you like because you like them!

This also links to reading and writing where you can refer back to the identity map and reflect with a student who’s stuck on writing. Write a funny story about your dog, or write a story about being a brother, etc.

Love this! Singer, communicator, Beijing person, daughter, bestie.

After making their identity map, I wanted students to dive deeper (a bit of finding out) more about three of their identity pieces and explain why they are important to them. Of course all pieces are important to them, so it was just a quick write of choosing three that they wanted to elaborate on.

As a scaffold, I supplied the sentence frame: Being a _________ is important to me because….

From this inquiry into who we are, we then looked at each other’s and compared what’s the same and what’s different. What kind of communities are there in our own little community? Do we share the same identities on our maps? What about our reasons for why their important? This was the beginning of getting into how we might think the same things are important, but their manifestations can be so different.

As a consolidation for this first lesson, we brainstormed in our groups to think about what stood out as important to us from both the heart maps and the identity maps. We came up with a list:

Here’s where we switched to about all things important both physical: iPads, bikes, books as well as our families, being Chinese, etc.

In the following lesson, I asked students in groups to take these items and sort them into categories. That was about all the instructions I gave! You can see how they manifested:

After we arranged them into groups and had students share their ideas with each other, we started the next lesson with a review of these sorts.

We had taught units on values before and I remembered it being difficult for students to grasp the nuances of values. They understand it as a concept, but I opted to do an explicit introduction to values. I said we grouped these things that are important to us and this group is actually connected to a bigger idea of what we call values. However, I did not give the definition of values to see what they would think or come up with.

I did a pre-load of finding the values that popped out of our initial list (above in green writing) and came up with these:

The different values that came up and their Chinese translations.

Students were then asked to work in their tables to sort what we said was important (and add any others) to the values as categories. What would be connected to friendship? Joy?

Before we started, I used a split-screen (from Kath Murdoch) approach to let students see how we were going to accomplish two goals at once.

One of our ATLs this unit is communication skills through listening. A big part of understanding each others’ identities and values is listening to not only what the value is, but why people have that value. How does it look in real life? So we are building the collaboration and listening skills throughout the unit. I love this strategy as students can see both a learning objective about sorting and a strategy how to do so: collaboration.

Students began to sort:

At one point a student pointed out that one thing can be included in two values so she drew a line to another value. Soon there were arrows everywhere and students making connections and discussing.

After sorting our ideas and looking around at each other’s tables, we discussed what we think values are. Students wrote in their notebooks: Values are…. and had to fill in the blank. There were ideas about categories, groups, etc. But I felt like it didn’t hit the mark (and I knew from years past it probably wouldn’t be super clear). So I supplied the definition for them to write in their personal mini-dictionaries.

As we have touched on tuning-in (who are we? What are our identities? What do we love?) and moving into sorting out (how do our identities and interests reflect our values?) I moved into a bit of going further: What values are most to least important to me?

I had students use the original list of values (and prompted them to fill in any other ones they would want to) and rank them in order of importance to them. We were going further with learning more about our own personal values and why we would put them in a certain order. Also another way to see how we compare to others. Why is family higher on my list than theirs?

We will then connect these personal values to our family’s values, China’s values, and the school’s values.

I loved doing this mini-inquiry into how our identities and what’s important to us can lead to these bigger ideas of values. Students slowly but surely get what values are as the unit progresses. These is such an important concept that manifests in all these words we throw around so often. We wanted students to have a deeper dive into what they mean and how they connect to their own personal lives. What does compassion look like to us in real life? What does family mean for me compared to other people?

We are pairing this unit with a non-fiction article about how South Australia banned single-use plastics to see how communities made a decision, what values are connected, and what is the impact of a decision.

The next part of the unit goes into how these values influence our decisions and what impacts those decisions have! Students will have a chance to brainstorm about the central idea and think of a personal interest to go further with and hopefully take some action.