For this final project, you will be a classroom teacher developing a creative and culturally relevant idea, concept, or movement for your school. Think about everything you have seen, heard, discussed, shared, and viewed over the past five weeks. What information stuck out as something you would want to implement in your school or classroom? Was there an idea that you wished you could share with your colleagues? What ideas did you discover that will help your students with being creative while also being culturally relevant? You are going to create a proposal for an idea that you would like to implement in your school. Think about to whom you would need to propose this idea? Your administrator? Colleague? PLC team? For a few more ideas to brainstorm, view this Association of School and Curriculum Development. (ASCD) video.
Your presentation can be formatted in a way that is appropriate to your style of presentation. You can write an essay, create a PPT with a voiceover, record a presentation with an accompanying outline (with citations and resources), or use one of the other ideas presented during this course. Included in your presentation/proposal should be the following:
Content Expectations
Part I: Audience and Rationale (2 points): Write an overview of the class/school/target population, including age ranges, grade(s), subject area(s), and relevant micro and macro cultural components. If you are not currently teaching, you may use a prior class, a colleague’s class, or invent demographic information.
Part II: Outcomes (3 points): List the objectives of the instructional experience/idea/concept being proposed.
- Content or Classroom Objectives
- 21st Century skills (emphasis on creativity)
- Cultural competencies to be explicitly addressed with the experience/idea/concept
Part III: Context/Instructional Description (3 points): Describe more specifically how the instructional experience/idea/or concept will be used in order to meet the Outcomes (listed above). Will it include:
- Creativity – How will creativity be encouraged?
- Problem solving – Will the activity focus on solving a problem?
- AND/OR
- Simulation – Will the students be involved with performing tasks that related to a real-world experience or activity?
Part IV: Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (8 points). Describe how and which four (at least) of these will be included in the experience/idea/concept?
- Maximizing academic success through relevant instructional experiences
- Addressing cultural competence through reinforcing students’ cultural integrity
- Involving students in the construction of knowledge
- Building on students’ interests and linguistic resources
- Tapping home and community resources
- Understanding students’ cultural knowledge
- Using interactive and constructivist teaching strategies
- Examining the experience/idea/concept from multiple perspectives
- Promoting critical consciousness through opportunities to challenge predominant elements of students’ social norms
Part V: Creativity/Innovation Strategies (8 points). Describe how and which four (at least) of these will be included in the experience/idea/concept?
- Encouraging students to believe in their culture-influenced creative potential
- Nurturing the confidence to try
- Helping learners find their creative strengths
- Promoting experiment and inquiry and a willingness to make mistakes
- Encouraging generative thought, free from immediate criticism
- Encouraging the expression of personal ideas and feelings
- Conveying an understanding of phases in creative work and the need for time
- Developing an awareness of the roles of intuition and aesthetic processes
- Encouraging students to play with ideas and conjecture about possibilities
- Facilitating critical evaluation of ideas
Written Communication Expectations
- Page Requirement (.25 points): The length of the final project will depend on the medium you choose; however, some general guidelines would be 8pages (for a paper), not including the title and reference pages.
- APA Formatting (.25 points): Format your paper according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center.
- Syntax and Mechanics (.25 points): Display meticulous comprehension and organization of syntax and mechanics, such as spelling and grammar.
- Resource Requirement (.25 points): Reference three scholarly sources in addition to the course textbooks, providing compelling evidence to support ideas. All sources on the references page need to be used and cited correctly within the body of the assignment.
