The Labor Art project was created after our eighth grade students finished reading A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. We wanted the students to use art, in this case poetry and songwriting to: raise awareness, inform the public, and inspire action on social issues. We wanted them to focus on the discrepancy between the haves and the have nots. We wanted them to take a close look at labor and class. Who builds the building we inhabit? Who profits? Who manufactures our goods? Who sews our clothes?

After doing research on global and local labor laws, human rights and working conditions the students will write a song or poem addressing the information they discovered. They will present these works live to the class and hopefully record a podcast for presentation on the wiki page. Although this project appears to be a writing assignment, the students are actually being assessed on their ability to use resources, sort information, and determine appropriateness of both sources and information.

The Benchmarks being assessed during the research phase are as follows:

• Use a variety of resource materials to gather information for a research topic
• Organize information and ideas from multiple sources in systematic ways
• Determine appropriateness of an information source for a research topic

1. We wanted the students themselves to prove that they have understood or completed each benchmark, so we asked them to use the levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy below to explain how they could show evidence that they could:

• Use a variety of resource materials to gather information for a research topic
• Organize information and ideas from multiple sources in systematic ways
• Determine appropriateness of an information source for a research topic

Knowledge: arrange, define, duplicate, label, list, memorize, name, order, recognize, relate, recall, repeat, reproduce, state.

Comprehension: classify, describe, discuss, explain, express, identify, indicate, locate, recognize, report, restate, review, select, translate,

Application: apply, choose, demonstrate, dramatize, employ, illustrate, interpret, operate, practice, schedule, sketch, solve, use, write.

Analysis: analyze, appraise, calculate, categorize, compare, contrast, criticize, differentiate, discriminate, distinguish, examine, experiment, question, test.

Synthesis: arrange, assemble, collect, compose, construct, create, design, develop, formulate, manage, organize, plan, prepare, propose, set up, write.

Evaluation: appraise, argue, assess, attach, choose compare, defend estimate, judge, predict, rate, core, select, support, value, evaluate.

They were to make a series of instructions that they would carry out using the verbs form above. See student examples here at our wiki. We will also assess one writing and one presentation benchmark to be mentioned later.

The students were also asked to brainstorm essential questions they wanted to answer through their research. We again used Bloom’s Taxonomy to make sure they were critically looking at this entire process.

1. How effective are the questions you are trying to answer? Take a look at the list of questions you have brainstormed.

• Put them in order of most important to you to least.
• Label the questions using labels like political, class, personal etc…
• Review your list and identify five questions you would like to answer
• Explain why you think the answers to these questions will make for good material for a poem.

We are now starting our research and thinking about our poems. I have also been sharing a song or two which deals with social issues with them everyday. We have listened to Bob Dyaln, Bob Marley, and Rage Against the Machine so far.

Please comment on this blog post if you or your students have any insight or information about class and labor in your community that they can share with us. Perhaps we can invite them to edit our wiki with first hand accounts, pictures, or helpful websites . Maybe we can arrange a skype forum to discuss some of these issues.

I will be out of town for a week starting Thursday, but I am keen to involve some kind of collaboration when we get back.