LaSalle II Magnet School, Chicago IL
Explore across Colombia the ways in which different communities embrace the natural world and confront issues of conservation and climate change, especially through public policy and grassroots education efforts, so that setting of the film and student-favorite “Encanto” will inspire and empower them to take action in the school community.
This photo, taken in the Getsemaní neighborhood of Cartagena, conveys the vibrancy of Colombia with its lively street life.
Minca is a small town nestled in the Sierra Nevada of northern Colombia, whose mountains are home to four indigenous communities who continue to conserve traditions that honor and protect the natural world.
Andrés Álvarez and Janni Benavides of Jacana Jacana sing with a group of children near the local river. In collaboration with local communities, biologists and conservation foundations, they create songs for nature in order to tell its stories.
Within the Moravia neighborhood of Medellín can be found stories of difficulty and of resilience. Here, a portrait of one of the founding women of Moravia watches over Corporación Corserba’s recycling and gardening projects.
Medellín’s Parques del Río is one urban planning effort to increase accessibility of the Medellín River and green corridors in the city in order to combat climate change and to create spaces where people can walk, play, learn and be close to nature.
Uberney, a local guide, talks to a novice birdwatcher in Jardín. Aptly named, this beautiful town and the surrounding area offer opportunities for immersing oneself in a slower pace of life while learning more about the department of Antioquia.
The fellowship enabled me to begin to get to know Colombia’s diverse cultures and often complicated history. For me, the most powerful experience when traveling is always connecting with others. Out of conversations with the chef in Cartagena, the musicians of Jacana Jacana, the local guides and hotel staff in Minca, Medellín and Jardín, my understanding of Colombia has grown bit by bit. I am thankful for these experiences and for people willing to share about their communities and themselves.
I learned to keep flexing my flexibility muscle while on the fellowship. Although I am practiced in learning how to negotiate different cultural ways of doing, it is always good to reflect on the ways our cultural lens affects our perceptions of situations. Professionally, I began my journey of learning about a country new to me and of how best to incorporate it into my Spanish as a world language curriculum.
New themes often arise organically when traveling. During my fellowship, it was birds! From Minca to Medellín to Jardín, where I met a 13 year-old budding ornithologist, they became a recurring theme. I had planned to explore how people embrace environmental stewardship in different communities, but I was not originally focused on birds. I now plan to incorporate lessons on migratory birds into my curriculum to teach about the connections between Chicago and areas where Spanish is spoken.
In the younger grades, students will interact with Jacana Jacana through a video question-and-answer session to learn more about their songs. I will also strengthen my current unit about biodiversity in the second grade curriculum through lessons about migratory birds. In the upper grades, I plan to implement lessons to compare Chicago’s urban planning and advocacy organizations with those of Medellín to enable students to examine how different locations choose to confront global issues.
As a part of my fellowship, I walked along the Parques del Río in Medellín, an initiative designed to increase accessibility of the Medellín River and to create spaces where people can walk, play, learn while being close to nature. I plan to create a field trip to the Chicago Riverwalk downtown, as well as the Wild Mile, a floating eco-park along the north branch of the Chicago River, so that students can compare urban planning efforts in Chicago and Medellín.
My fellowship experience has left me thinking a lot about environmental stewardship in urban areas, as well as the natural connections that exist between locations near and far. I would like to work with local nature-based artists or groups to offer school-wide assemblies or workshops for students and families, so that even students who do not take Spanish can still be a part of the learning around these topics.