Have you been looking for ways you and your school community can make a larger impact on our world? Are you looking for ways to promote global sustainability and inclusivity while also staying true to your content area? Well, look no further than WE.org. WE is an organization that helps classrooms around the world expand their volunteering efforts beyond their school communities. They provide resources such as videos, conferences, lesson plans, events, grants, and so much more in order to help you and your students achieve your goals.

Using their Virtual Learning Center, educators can find lessons and professional development courses that will help them provide the education they need to students about ways they can get involved and why they should. They focus on several global sustainable development goals including things such as hunger, waste clean up, and equity. There are lists of several campaigns for classrooms to get involved in. Or you can view their lesson plans and modules to learn about a specific goal or volunteer effort and you and your students can develop your own campaigns. Through this site you can also get grants to support your campaign and expand your outreach. All of their resources range from kindergarten to the high school level, so it really is for everyone!

As a future art teacher, I wanted to find lessons or campaigns I could use in my classroom where students can use the visual arts to help promote or be a part of any cause they had to offer. I was able to find a couple of lessons that I could see myself using in the future as ways to get my students involved.

We Go Green is a campaign outline that guides teachers through teaching students about waste and recycling. At each grade level, students will learn statistics about waste and recycling and come up with plans on how they can promote having a green thumb or how they themselves can help contribute to reducing waste.

Students individually or in groups can make their own goals and come up with a plan to achieve them. Then they can give themselves jobs within their campaign for how they will help to complete their goals. I thought this was interesting for an art classroom because not only can they create beautiful posters and works of art that promote recycling and reducing waste, but they can also use the waste!

By collecting trash and recycling from around the school, home, and in their communities, they can repurpose this trash to make works of art that are representative of the cause. I could even see myself planning an art show within the school to showcase the work. The event would showcase student work and display how many pounds of waste they were able to upcycle to create their work. And on a larger scale, we could possibly even turn it into a fundraiser!

Understanding Local Hunger is a unit plan on WE.org that teaches students about hunger and low resources on a local to global scale. Throughout the unit, the teacher will guide the students on learning about hunger, analyzing the statistics, coming up with possible causes, and then creating and developing possible solutions. These lessons come in all grade levels. However for the purpose of talking about how I would use this resource, I am focusing on the high school unit. These lessons are fully developed including the common core standards, objectives, resources, and procedures for each lesson. The structure for each lesson unique and caters towards all types of learners and works across all content areas. These lessons pull from math, science, English, history, and the visual arts in order to create a dynamic unit that fully encompasses everything students would need to know before developing their solutions.

Lesson 5 is specifically what I want to focus on since it involves media. In this lesson, students would have to use any art form, digital or traditional, to create a visual representation of a statistic about hunger.

I think this is an amazing lesson and project that I could have them do in groups for two to three days or individually over the course of a few days. In addition to teaching them about hunger and why it is so important, this would also be a great time to teach them about how visual media can display messages and create an atmosphere or certain perception of their subject. We could also tie in a lesson about symbolism and how certain symbols or aesthetic choices can change the meaning of your work. We could view examples of works by famous photographers, painters, and graphic designers that depict hunger and its impact on society. Students can gain inspiration about how to convey their message and statistic and use what they have learned to create their visual representation. Again we can even share these on a larger scale in an art show or online gallery!

As mentioned, if I were to pursue these projects, I would want my students to be able to share their work on a larger scale and make the greatest impact. I would want my students to understand how art can impact people and promote and messages that are important in ways that sometimes words cannot only describe. Therefore, I could reach out to WE.org and apply for their action grants such as the Heartwarming Project. Through this grant we could receive some funding that could help is in sharing their hard work outside of our school community by creating a larger event where we can to donation drives, fundraisers, recycling program, and so on. WE.org is truly a great organization and is something I will heavily consider looking into more in the future when I have my own classroom.

CHECK OUT WE.ORG FOR MORE INFORMATION ON HOW YOU AND YOUR STUDENTS CAN GET INVOLVED!

Thank you for reading!

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