Global Literature Circles

As a senior undergraduate student at the University of Northern Iowa, it is extremely challenging to develop a global collaboration unit because everything is hypothetical. I am not yet an English teacher, I do not have students, and I have never tried literature circles, let alone global literature circles. I am taking a class this semester called "Using Digital and Social Media in Education" with about 15 adult teachers and professionals who have much more experience than me. It is difficult and exhausting to be held to the same standard of developing lessons for a global collaboration unit as educators who have been in their field for years.

In regards to the development process, I first had to decide which text I'd like to hypothetically teach and which two schools I'd like to hypothetically pair together. Since I have been in several classrooms at Cedar Falls High School and hope to student teach at Singapore American School, I decided to pair these two schools for this project. One of the challenges of doing this, though, is the fact that there is a 14 hour time difference between Iowa and Singapore. This led me to make the decision that students would record videos to send to one another instead of speaking in real time. A success with this project is the fact that I have used Wix to create websites before, so although developing the content took hours of work, the process of putting it all together into this website went relatively smoothly.

I expect that students who complete this project will enjoy working with students from the other side of the world. While I can see my students becoming frustrated with the process of recording and watching videos instead of talking in real time, I think it also teaches students how the world does not revolve around them, and they must be patient with communication. My hope is that the students will also enjoy reading The Catcher in the Rye and exploring the universal themes which apply to people wherever they might live. If I were to implement this project in my future classroom, I'd also like to create some sort of discussion thread or Facebook page where students can communicate with one another about whatever they'd like (as long as it's school appropriate) so they are able to make some lasting friendships beyond this unit.