The Meat and Potatoes

What is our purpose for going to Ireland? What do we hope to achieve? What's the meat and potatoes, our essential learning, for our work in Ireland?

We have three guiding questions that act as our compass for learning in our Immigration Expedition in 7th grade: Why do people immigrate? Why does prejudice exist? and How does the American Dream exist today? In part of our grant application, we wrote:

"...we have selected two case studies that help students analyze the issues of immigration and prejudices- Irish Immigration and Mexican Immigration. ...we can teach our students about the potato famine, we can relate events in chronological order and we can discuss cause and effect. But we lack raw emotion. By traveling to Ireland to explore and experience the calamity of the potato famine, and the mass migration out of Ireland, we hope to bring to our students a better "reality" of what it must have been like for people to leave their home country. We want to explore the culture of Ireland in the 1800s to better understand how that led to American stereotypes, and ultimately how those stereotypes led to prejudice. ...we can better guide them through their journey in addressing why prejudice existed and ultimately why it still exists today in our own school and community.

Harvey Daniels, the leading expert in literature circles, once said, "In order to look in the mirror, one must first look out the window." This is the approach we will take with our students. We believe that in order to plant the seeds of change within our students, we must first address the macro idea of immigration. Irish immigration will be used as our case study in which students will follow the journey the Irish took in realizing the American Dream. Ultimately, we will use the Irish experience as the link to current immigration and cultural issues within our community today, asking students to look in the mirror when examining Mexican immigration.

Our goals for our students are to develop a sense of compassion, empathy and awareness to groups of people who successfully struggle to overcome extreme poverty and hardships to achieve the American Dream. We want our students to develop a sense that the American Dream is accessible regardless of what economic and social level they were born into and that hope exists because of the stories of the immigrants who came before them. Through a cross cultural comparison between Ireland and Mexico, students will understand how an immigrant group of the past overcame prejudice and achieved the American Dream and how an immigrant group in the present is striving for the American Dream today."

Our hope is that our research in Ireland takes us through the same journey of learning we will ask our students to take. Because Expeditions are centered around guiding questions, we have transformed our trip to Ireland into our own Expedition. Thus, our guiding questions for our trip are:

Under what conditions did the Irish immigrate during the Potato Famine?
Why does prejudice exist?
How did the American Dream exist for famine Irishmen?

Ultimately, our purpose is to seek answers to these questions. We will publish our learning throughout our journey, but our final product/demonstration of what we learn will be a published photo essay. This is the meat and potatoes of our Expedition to Ireland.

Noel