 Hi, my name is Paul Ellison. I'm the Tech Liaison for the New York City Writing Project and oh, 11 years ago started a site called youthvoices.net and along with Chris Sloan in Salt Lake City and many many others I've been building this site now for over a decade and I want to just share a few things and have some old video and some new video and just want to show you how we start with questions, how we think about inquiry and starting where students passions are, where their interests are, where their curiosities are and yeah, let me show you a video, very brief video from this summer where I explain what youthvoices means to me and then we'll jump in and look at our first assignment, 10 self-ten world questions and free writing and move out toward a more complete picture of what an inquiry project might look like. Thanks for hanging with me here. See you soon. Youth Voices is a school-based social network started by a group of teachers from the National Writing Project. The program is dedicated to bringing students and teachers together to create an open forum for discussion of current events, multimedia projects, or even sharing free writing projects such as poems and short stories. I'm really passionate about youthvoices, but it's not just a website and that's what's always been true. It's it's a an orientation. It's a way of looking. It's a way of respecting everybody and treating people as peers and it's a way of organizing learning around your interests, what you're passionate about, what you're good at, and starting there and moving out. Now let's go back a year to summer of 2013 where I talked a little more about our approach and why we do the things we do on Youth Voices, but more importantly I lay out the first three assignments we often give students both in some time and throughout the year. Youth Voices is a website that is a social network that we've been building in different ways over the past ten years. On the site students publish their own work, their digital work, and and they learn how to respond to each other and we learned from all of that. We know that there are many many processes in learning to read and learning to do research in taking texts apart and in the writing of something significant and important. How do you go from interest to deeper learning? Yes, there's a curriculum about the processes kids should do, but is there a content that they should do? Interest-based learning is so important in itself and you know, medieval times and Greek civilization and or whatever global history or whatever science curriculum or curriculum itself is also important. And so what happens when those things bump up against each other? And so those are the kinds of issues that we thought we could explore together in the summertime. But what we know in the Writing Project is that starting with yourself is really really important. Administrators, I think that they trust me to do things as I see fit, but sometimes I think that the the issue is the how. Like what are the words like in Google if you're gonna search for that question you'd be able to find that question. Okay, we'll get back to you. Okay, so you may notice that we just gave you three assignments. So you're gonna write three paragraphs about yourself. You're gonna make an avatar or an icon. It can't be your likeness. It can't be a picture of you. Ten questions, real real questions. Your neighborhood, your past, your future, your family, deep questions, things you have questions that you have about yourself. Then ten questions about the world could be religion, politics, big questions. Do I have friends that are trustworthy? What does the modern man think about the modern woman? Are we actually being heard in society or ignored? What will my profession be? Why is bullying such a big issue? Like their surroundings that they live in, how does that affect their decisions and that will affect the way they live their life. Why am I quiet when I should be loud? Women's language. Why will the government in Egypt stop murdering its people? Do I still believe that there's such thing as bad people? What kind of person do my friends portray me as? When I had a chance to help my brother, why didn't I? What is my identity? How much longer will the indigenous people of Latin America continue to suffer because of their own wealth? Doing the ten self-time world questions and then what we follow that with is immediately is coming up with five keywords for each question. So that begins to give categories, it gives categories for the questions. My keyword, I put voices in society. I put helping. Incarnation. What's your topic? Well the question was how much longer will the indigenous people of Latin America continue to suffer because of their own wealth? Did you try indigenous people? How do we just teach them to love learning? I would probably start with the ten world questions because that probably gets me thinking about the world and probably how our history has formed these questions for them or helped them think about these questions. Rik was the student who I originally saw her researching about Egypt because that's where her family is. Rik, say your question again. Mine was, when will the government of Egypt stop murdering its people? But then when this whole story about Trayvon Martin and the not guilty verdict came out, then she became interested in that. Okay, you said Zimbabwe free, what now? What happens to the rest? That just makes it to say that it's okay to shoot anybody that you think is suspicious. Might as well shoot me because I'm a scarf on, I might be a terrorist. Might as well shoot anyone else, you know what I mean? You said this guy free, you allow society to do whatever they want. You know what I mean? There's got to be limits, there's got to be things, you know what I mean? What I guess concerns me though, although I love the fact that she's studying something and she's learning something great about our process as a country and what we go through and how we find these things out. Is that going to get her the skills that she's going to need? How many of you have done free writing to make something? In other words, free writing and then you did a focus sentence and then you did more free writing and more free writing. After you do the free writing, we're going to ask you to do a focus sentence. And a focus sentence is totally the opposite of free writing. Free writing, you go wild, you follow tangents, you allow yourself to go anywhere you want to when you're writing. You'll start with your questions, your two or three questions, and you'll write as fast as you can. Not as fast, but non-stop. It doesn't have to be fast, but you shouldn't stop. Mori was describing the beginnings of the research process and how free rights were used to inspire further examination and help him actually get to a more focused topic. And then you talked about subtopics. Yes, that's how your topic can lead to a subtopic. And that subtopic, you do research on it and then lead to another, which was the process to get you to think, to get you to research more, to get you to learn more and more about your subject. From the 10 self and 10 world questions, students developed a triad of questions, three questions. We then had them look at the questions and see if they could chunk them into groups. Then we want to deepen your inquiry and there are two choices here. One is to find a video or a podcast audio about your topic. Can you talk a little more about the video you annotated? It was a speech about Trayvon Martin that Obama gave. I actually wanted to come, it's not to take questions, but speak to an issue that obviously has gotten a lot of attention over the course of the last week, the issue of the Trayvon Martin rule. How is it different annotating that in popcorn or just watching a video? I watched it the first time, but I feel like once I got to annotate it, I fully understood it even more because I had to stop it, hear it again, and then annotate it. Make sure annotation goes with the part of the video that I annotated and I just feel like I fully understood it that way. The other deeper way to go is we want you to think about finding more difficult texts. The way schools talk about this now is text complexity. So we want you to find a more complex text about your topic. So the last thing I wanted to ask you about this whole process is how does this differ? What do you notice about this process and maybe the process that you use at school to write an essay? At my school, we read books and then we write about a literary element about the book, what literary element we see that wasn't taught in the book or used in the book, so we write about that. We learn more about technology. He taught us how to go on other websites and put them into youth voices. For example, with the Prokodok, it's already in youth voices, but we learn how to do it online on annotation and finding videos like here. I found a video on YouTube and I'm annotating it right here. We want everybody to know that that's our goal. Now let's turn to a video from eight years ago in my classroom where we were doing very much the same kinds of things around ten world, ten self-questions. It's important to understand that this work is based on the work of James A. Bean and his work in democratic education. And Paolo Frere and his work with generative themes and obviously Pierre Alba's work with free writing. So yeah, it's been important for many, many years, this kind of work, leading towards students, finding their passions, finding what's at the heart of their curiosities and developing those together. So here's a video from eight years ago. Okay, so we're asking ten questions about yourself, ten questions about the world that you have. I see some people doing it easily and some people having difficulty. Right here, please. What do you have? What? What will I do for a living? Why do I laugh a lot and will I ever get a dog? Those are real questions? I guess. Well, think about it. Make them real, okay? Make them think. I like your first question. What's your first question? Why am I only good at things that nobody cares about? What are you talking about? I don't know. Well, I was really big fan of video games and I'm good at hand that coordination. What else? I heard that. Video games is a good example. I don't really care about board games either. I'm good at chess now. I'm good at playing chess and nobody really cares about chess. And things like that. Okay, can you list those two things and if there's anything else to list there? Chess and video games? Like chess and video games. Because I think it's worth holding on to. So you're asking world questions right away? Okay, so what are your world questions? You caught me? Yeah. Come on. Why does the city have bad environment? Why does the city have to have drugs? Why are there not a lot of cops in the city? Okay. What's your question? I start extinct. How do you what? Start extinct. How are you brothers? E-X-T-I-M-C-T. What's your question? What's your question? Will humans become extinct? I wanted to know will humans be extinct? What? Will humans be extinct? It's okay. It's okay. Come on. And will the world be covered in water? What else? Will there be flying cars? How was the air form, the big bang, or what? And what would New York look like in the future? That's all I have so far. Okay, cool. That's cool. Okay, so why don't you make that homework? Something more general. We're studying. Homework's one word. Homework is one word. Huh? Students need to go to school in the future. What they need to do is make it fly. What they need to do is to chill. Whatever they have to come to New York again, but cheaper. Alright, so this is a bit of a mess. Even though these 9th graders were great. You know, they handled it. Are you recording? Yes. Would I go to college? Would I become a lawyer? You skipped the first one, why? Because, I don't want to say that. I'm not going to say older than what I got to say older. That's a good one. No. Okay, go ahead. What do you read? Alright. Whatever, like the Yankees again? Why has to be Dominican? Why do I like to study law? Why do I seem to look like I'm more different than others? Why do I have to be so confident? Why do many girls tell me because I get an opportunity? And why do people consider me considered? I say it. Alright. So your question is, am I normal size? Yeah. Does that make sense, right? Yeah, it doesn't look like self-questions. What are they again? Thank you for taking the time to look at this issue of 10 self-ten world questions, this issue of starting with kids' questions, their passions, their curiosities, and building out to generative themes that they can study and go deeper with. I want to refer you better to Curriculum Integration, by Bean's book, especially Chapter 4, where a lot of the ideas around this came from. And if you go to our page on Youth Voices, youthvoices.net, slash questions, you can learn more about what we're up to here. And there are specific ideas. There's a link to the free writing mission as well, which lays out what to do once you have a group of questions or a question that you'd like to explore. And or there's Chris Lone's recent, taking an idea on a date, getting started, youthvoices.net slash getting started. Mission. Again, I don't know how to say this more clearly. I gave this this much time because I think it's key. A colleague I worked with recently said to me, their questions weren't so good. And my response to her was, well, let's go back and do it again. Because our students do have passions. They do have curiosities. They do have important questions that they want to get started on and that they want to explore. And I just want to say, Youth Voices is a great place to do that. We welcome you to this community if you'd like to join us. And let me know what you think of this, I hope, limited and focused notion that we've been exploring here at youthvoices.net. Thank you for your time again. Bye.