DESIGNING
THE FAMILY INTERVIEW ASSIGNMENT
I aimed to launch the assignment with an immediate sense of student ownership. On the first day of my two-week unit, I pulled up a blank page on the Smartboard and told the students that we would be designing and conducting an interview to help us answer the unit questions of:
Why do people leave home?
What makes a good home?
How do you make a new home from scratch?
What obstacles do immigrants face?
I told them that a lot of people think that you can only learn about history through studying famous people and famous events but that actually you can learn it through studying regular people. People like you and me. People like your grandparents and parents.
I asked the students to turn and talk and to consider what questions we should definitely ask in an interview of a family member that would help us to answer the essential questions about leaving home and creating a new one.
The students talked busily with one another and I had the sense that they were hooked. We came back together as a class and collected contributions in order to compile a list of questions that we should ask our interviewees. Later in the day, I printed out the assignment description—along with the interview questions that they had written themselves—and included both in the homework packet that would be sent home for the week.
Here is the final version of the interview questions that the students came up with:
In which country and city were you born?
What was your life like there?
Why did you leave?
What year was it when you left?
Did you come on a boat or a plane?
Did you leave anyone behind?
What difficulties did you have when you first arrived?
What accomplishments did you have?
Was your new home what you expected?
What's something you miss?
Did you bring any traditions?
What is a new tradition you learned?
While I included many of the original questions that my students proposed in our class discussion, I ended up changing some of the language and even chose to eliminate a few questions if they seemed too specific or strange or redundant. For example, one girl said, ‘I know this sounds kind of weird, but I want to ask… Where they took a shower in their old home.’ Making a quick decision in the moment, I replaced her question with, ‘What was your life like there?’
Later, I felt badly about altering her question so much. I understand now that her curiosity was legitimate. She was trying to come up with a question that would pull up particular information about the quality and condition of life that a person might have had in another country.
In fact, in a survey that I handed out to students at the end of my first week of takeover, one student mentioned this specific problem:
"I liked that we got to come up with questions ourselves"
"I didn't like how some of the question didn't make it"
In the future, I would have explained more clearly why I thought we should adapt or eliminate a particular question that a student offered and I would have asked for their collaboration in modifying the question.
Next Pg.
