Revised Project Proposal
Original Project Proposal
Revised Project Proposal
Background
“The Talking Walls of Providence” draws inspiration from The Talking Walls by Margy Burns Knight. This picture book series features some of the stories behind famous walls from around the world, including Mayan Murals, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Nelson Mandela’s Prison Walls, Diego Rivera’s Murals, and the Barracks of Angel Island. Educators have shared the series with elementary school students to explore world cultural and political history while highlighting some of the social functions and impacts of boundaries.
While the walls, pictures and stories in Knight’s original series have been adapted into a marketed educational software program, ours will not be marketed. It will feature original content (focusing on various walls in and around Providence) and original program design tailored to the learning needs of Sandra Kaufman’s 4th grade social studies class at the Lincoln School for girls and young women. We plan to make our program accessible to learners throughout Rhode Island schools and communities.
The Talking Walls of Providence
The software program will be one component of a classroom unit that seeks to motivate students to immerse themselves in local history by learning various ways of seeing and understanding walls in the Providence and surrounding communities.
The program will provide learners with access to some of the cultural and political histories behind five to six different local walls representing a wide range of learning opportunities (Walls may include the Cornel Young Jr. memorial wall and its adjacent Community of Peace wall, Graffiti Walls, the Rhode Island Training School walls, walls of abandoned mental asylums, abandoned factory or mill walls, Stone Walls, the Wall of Tiles at the Convention Center, the Ernest Hamlin Baker’s WPA mural, “The Economic Activities of Narragansett Planters,” amongst many others).
It will be a resource for learners to investigate the background of these walls before going to visit them, on-site—where the students may engage in a variety of experiential activities to learn about different communities’ relationships to the walls.
The program may have a supporting website to guide learners in further investigation. This could serve as a place for learners to synthesize or share what they have learned through various creative projects, such as oral history or arts projects.
The program will come with a teacher’s resource section with additional resources or links, to allow the teacher as much flexibility and autonomy as possible in preparing lesson plans.
Timeline
Thursday, February 17—Initial meeting with Sandra Kaufman.
Friday February 25—Share research and identify what we should continue to look for.
Thursday, March 3—Narrow down pool of possibilities to 15 walls.
Friday, March 4—Second meeting with Sandra Kaufman. Bring pictures and materials for 15 possible walls.
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Original Proposal
School: The Lincoln School
Teachers: Sandra Kaufman
Audience: Fourth graders
Project: The Talking Walls of Providence. If you Google "Talking Walls" you'll see that it's a method of teaching cultural history by revealing the significance of walls that students see and pass everyday. Ms. Kaufman envisions a learning game that makes use of various walls in Providence, allowing students to explore, inquire, and learn about ways of seeing these phenomena. A combination of cultural anthropology, history and sociology, this computer-based exercise would be valuable to her students. Possible tools include Director, Authorware, and Java/HTML.
Comments: A great project that builds on a well-established method of teaching, anchored in this community. Obviously this project could produce a program for widespread use in RI, not to mention a fun and innovative instructional game.
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