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Finding Grace and Kindness: Reflections on a First BLTN Exchange

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May 31, 2023 by Jacob Belvery

Jacob Belvery
Conestoga High School
Murray, Nebraska

In late fall and winter, Sara Taggart of Mifflin High School in Columbus, Ohio and I began an exchange with our students. We planned the experience to promote awareness of our similarities and differences, highlighting Sara’s Columbus students’ urban settings, and our rural setting. By having our students from these different settings exchange views, we hoped to promote more nuanced understandings of others.

Last summer, we decided to work together after looking through a BLTN planning document, and seeing that we were looking for similar styles of projects. We realized we were each eager to engage our students with each other’s contrasting places. We met once in person at Bread Loaf to form a general idea for what we might do, Zoomed once at the beginning of the project to make sure we were on the same page, and then exchanged numerous emails throughout the duration of the project. 

Our Exchange Structure

To keep things manageable, Sara and I both decided to involve a single class among our multiple preps. I involved 19 students in one of my sophomore classes. Sara had a roughly even number of students from one of her sophomore classes as well. This focus, we each hoped, would allow us to design for quality interactions. We used the Padlet platform to host the exchange. 

Key components of our exchange were as follows: 

  • Common Literary Analysis: We chose selections of place-rich literature to engage our students in discussion of characters and setting. 
  • About Our School / Community: Students created and shared presentations and videos about our places
  • About Me: Students composed posts to represent themselves. Content ranged from favorite activities to holidays and artwork. 
  • Writing of Place: Students posted poetry or creative nonfiction-style pieces about a place that is meaningful to them. 
  • I Was Wondering: Throughout the phases of the exchange, we kept this forum open so students could ask questions of one another. 

Each phase of the exchange had a distinct feel to it. I was learning all the while and I made plenty of adjustments along the way. Below are some reflections from each phase. 

Common Literary Analysis
We wanted to find literature that had strong and contrasting senses of place. This turned out to be slightly challenging. I struggled to find work that was accessible and that adequately described contemporary rural Nebraska. I looked at Willa Cather and Laura Ingalls Wilder, but neither of them seemed quite right for our group, and to represent our setting. Rural life is not fast paced, but it certainly has changed in the decades since those authors wrote. I decided on a selection from Karen Hesse’s book length poem, Out of the Dust, which while set in Kansas, seemed to be a good representation of Nebraska life. Sara’s class selected Walter Dean Myers’ short story, “The Treasure of Lemon Brown,” for our common reading and discussion. Set in Harlem, the story enabled us to discuss characters in an unfamiliar urban setting. 

After reading the two texts, students collaborated on a Jamboard and gave some responses to the settings of the stories. 

Students from both sites responded to the settings of “The Treasure of Lemon Brown” and Out of the Dust. Click on image for larger display.
Nebraska students responded to how well Out of the Dust portrays their rural setting (left) and Ohio students did the same for “…Lemon Brown.” Click on image for larger display.

About Our School Community

Next, students were to create presentations and videos about our places. We talked about aspects of our lives that we wanted to share, and formed groups to brainstorm. We decided to share about corn, what to do for fun, what activities we offer at our school, our demographic breakdown, and a few other things my students thought were important. 

This was eye-opening for my students. I don’t think they were ready for the diversity of Ms. Taggart’s school, which was exciting for me because the dissonance was exactly what I was looking for. With that said, an unexpected dynamic developed. 

I think my students were trying to be funny in their responses, but humor is notoriously difficult to translate. Nothing was very bad or rude, but it was easy to read comments about our different places as terse or sarcastic instead of more kindly humorous. 

Some of the sarcastic responses were about living in Nebraska. One student responded to a genuine question about what our region is like, with “Dirt and corn.” When asked about the weather, a couple of students described it as “bipolar.”

One of the students from Ms. Taggart’s class asked what else we eat besides corn, which, as Ms Taggart clarified, was more a question about varieties of regional dishes. My students missed the nuance and responded, “I swear we don’t eat only corn…We eat potatoes too.” This was the point at which we decided we needed to create and teach response guidelines. We didn’t want the Padlet to come to resemble something like an internet chatboard or Twitter. We wanted honest, deliberate, and sincere responses to each other.

Ms. Taggart and I finally settled on the following criteria for responses: 

  • Read at least 5 posts.
  • Respond to at least 2 posts.
  • Your response should include the following:
    • A comment/comments that show you read/watched the entire piece, including a compliment about the format or content- something new you learned, something you thought was interesting, etc.  Cite something specific from the work shared. This should be at least 2 complete sentences.
  • A follow-up question for the person based on the content shared

These criteria helped to limit sarcasm, and prompted much more in-depth responses.

About Me

Next, we focused on presenting ourselves.  

My students were inclined to share generalities—activities they were involved in, favorite books and TV shows, and general information about their families. Some of Ms. Taggart’s students shared about specific things that were important to their identities. One student shared about Ramadan and the importance of the holiday in her life. Another created a slideshow of their artwork. 

I was pleased with the variety of ways students chose to share. Student responses to one another were much better than in previous activities and fostered good conversation and communication. My students were excited to read these exchanges. The dialogue helped us to understand more about this group of kids from Columbus. 

An illustration of supportive responses via Padlet. (The posts eliciting response are omitted for brevity. Pink contains Ohio response to a Nebraska post; blue is the reverse. Click on images for larger display)

Writing of Place

With the general charge of using creative writing to evoke ideas of place, students wrote poetry or creative nonfiction-style pieces about places that meant something to them.

I was struck by the place of vulnerability we found ourselves in. We were inviting our students to share places that meant something very personal to them. This vulnerability was scary, but it also enabled us to practice grace and acceptance with each other.

Again, thoughtful responses abounded to each other’s writings. What moved me, and what makes me want to continue exchange work, was the grace and kindness that our students had for each other. They were supportive of the writing, interested in the places, curious about how the places shaped and changed the person they belonged to, and eager to share their own. Essentially, it was everything I love about teaching in one simple exchange project. 

Finding grace and kindness: Students becoming more adept at affirming one another’s intentions and craft. (Pink Padlet posts show Ohio response to Nebraska; blue show the reverse. Click on images for larger display.)

I Was Wondering

Questions in this venue ranged from favorite sports teams, favorite teachers, what sorts of concerts we have at school, Netflix shows, classes offered, and what sorts of food we ate. The questions were interesting in their variety and reflected genuine curiosity in each other as a group. 

Reflections: Teaching the Craft of Response

I learned quickly that our students had some very insightful questions and some very sarcastic inclinations. My class was a very playful class and wanted to have fun with this project and with the other students, but understandably, sometimes that humor was missed. 

On the other hand, once we worked with the new criteria and shifted to writing about place, all of the students had very kind and insightful responses to each other. With a bit more guidance, students’ kindness came through much more than the humor. 

Finishing a First Exchange

Overall, I thought the exchange went well. I have not done exchanges like this, so I have nothing to compare with, but my students and I enjoyed the experience and learned much about diversity and culture of students in Columbus, Ohio. 

I found the exchange valuable in part because it allowed us to share information about ourselves with people that we don’t know and we got a glimpse of how people from a very different region–with different lifestyles, backgrounds, and cultures than us–live. I would definitely recommend the exchange process to other teachers because it gave students an opportunity to view other people’s cultures and ways of life in a real way where we actually communicated with these people rather than just reading about their cultures in textbooks. It really gave us an opportunity to sincerely communicate with these people and see what life in a bigger city is like, too. Omaha is the biggest city that we have and it doesn’t really compare to a city like Columbus, so it was interesting to see what it is like to live in for lack of better words, “a real city.” Finally, and maybe most importantly, in describing their own places to distant peers, my students began to value the interest their Columbus correspondents held for our place. Along the way, they learned how to communicate more carefully and kindly when encountering differences. 

“It is really weird to think that these kids are interested in us. We go to school in the middle of corn fields with kids from all over. We have kids from the trailer parks of Nehawka, Beaver Lake, and Plattsmouth. We have rich kids whose parents drive Mustangs and Teslas. We even have people from Union and Bellevue, over 25-minute drives. We are such a small school of just over 300 junior and senior high school kids. Why would kids from such a large and diverse school care about us? Everything about us is completely the opposite of them, from numbers to the way we get to school to the food that is served to us. It is a very unique thing to be able to see into the life of someone who goes to such a large school…”

Kylee, Conestoga student

1 comment »

  1. Renee Moore says:

    Jacob,
    I thoroughly enjoyed reading about your first BLTN exchange. The students’ questions and responses to each other are so authentic, and joyfully reminded me of one of my first BLTN exchanges. In 1994 [93-94 school year], my Mississippi Delta 9th graders worked with peers in Soweto, South Africa on the Mississippi/South Africa Freedom Project. The Project celebrated and compared the first free elections in SA with the anniversary of the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi. We read one coming-of-age novel from each country.

    Neither I nor the Soweto teacher yet had internet in our schools. I used dial-up from my house to upload student responses typed on the single IBM PS/2 computer in our classroom. She went to the University in Johannesburg to print out hard copy and post them on the wall for her student. Likewise, I printed out the messages from the Soweto students (on long green printer paper) and taped it to the chalkboard (yes, chalk) in my room.
    Despite the technical challenges, the exchange was wildly successful. Students went far above and beyond our plans or expectations. On their own, for example, they created glossaries for each other of the Southern, African American, Afrikaans, and Zulu words in the novels, complete with their social connotations!

    I you and your students go on to explore and enjoy more of these powerful literacy exchanges.

    Renee Moore
    BLSE ’97

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