One night in May 2023 a high school in Cuernavaca, Mexico, was transformed into a film festival: the walls were covered with film posters; projectors were set up in the screening rooms; the film directors were all assembled, dressed in evening wear for the occasion; statuettes were lined up to celebrate the highest-quality works; there was even popcorn available in the halls! This was the culmination of a transdisciplinary project about peace and well-being. The directors were a group of 117 tenth graders, who had worked in groups of four to create a short film exposing a specific social problem that affected their community and proposing a solution for it. The topics were as diverse as the students: teenage pregnancy, migration, violence against women, racial and LGBTQ+ discrimination, plastic waste, prevention of COVID-19, and bullying.
At the film festival, the students were premiering their films for an audience of friends, families, teachers, and school principals. The audience watched three-to-five minute films in which students showed what mattered to them and how they could help create a world with fewer inequalities, conflicts and suffering. After the screening, the audience had the chance to ask questions to the rookie producers about their process of learning and the technical decisions they made about their films. As the best shorts received their recognition for complexity, authenticity and craftsmanship, people applauded and hugged in joy. Looking at this atmosphere of shining dresses, laughter and celebration of learning, someone might think that everything was wonderful during the project. But it was not an easy journey. The students had to adjust to a new way of learning, the teachers had to abandon their protagonic role and the mentors had to manage a whirlwind of emotions, just like in a movie that has you on the edge of your seat.
The Peace and Wellbeing Film Project took place simultaneously in three campuses of PrepaTec, a private high school with a total of 34 campuses across Mexico. PrepaTec was founded, and continues to be run, by Tecnológico de Monterrey, a Mexican university (which, like PrepaTec, has campuses across the country). The three campuses took part because they volunteered to be part of a pilot program in which they coordinated a transdisciplinary project with the driving question “How can we become peace and well-being builders in our community and beyond?”
The three campuses that volunteered were Cuernavaca, Estado de México and Monterrey. To give a sense of their location, Cuernavaca is two hours from Estado de México by car. Monterrey, on the other hand, is at least ten hours from either of the other two.
This particular account focuses on Cuernavaca, where I work as chemistry teacher and for this particular project I worked as a PBL coach. I was one of fourteen teachers on the campus tasked with bringing this project to life. Our mission was to facilitate a transformative learning experience for 117 10th grade students. We were given this mission in June 2022. We would launch with students in January 2023. We had seven months to plan.
Everyone on the initial team had some experience with “project-based learning,” at least according to our own definitions of what that meant, but we quickly realized that designing a clearly structured multidisciplinary project was very different from anything we had experienced before. To get us up to speed, Tecnológico de Monterrey provided a workshop in-person with teachers including Jennifer D. Klein, from Principled Learning Strategies, Inc.
We designed the project over the course of the summer. In November I led a series of PBL workshops for teachers who were going to take part in the project. Unfortunately (and inevitably) just before the project launched, we found out that some of the teachers who were expected to take part had not been included in the November training, so they would need to do all their training once the project was already running.
We were supported with guidance and advice from three department directors, the campus principal and three national directors. These people also provided the materials and spaces for different project activities. The teachers had access to a website where they could find the project overview; the milestones; external PBL resources like the ones from High Tech High, the Buck Institute for Education, Principled Learning Strategies and What School Could Be; protocols and routine handouts for doing gallery walks, empathy interviews, contracts, etc.; and a section for posting the weekly newsletter of the activities and achievements of the project. The resources were there, but putting that into action would be the hard part.
The teachers joined a Google Chat group to communicate with each other and plan the lessons and due dates for the products. One of the teachers assumed the role of coordinator. They met monthly by Zoom to discuss the main issues of the implementation with the students, the logistics of different launch events and also just to share their feelings and problems as teachers in a complex situation. At first, the teachers had a rough time talking to their peers from other areas of knowledge. For example, I remember a difficult conversation between a social studies teacher and a Spanish teacher. The social studies teacher was expecting that students would learn how to do research in the Spanish class, but the Spanish Teacher was working on grammar and orthography. Many conversations mediated by the coordinator happened to decide who would be responsible for what.
How did the teachers connect the perspectives of different subjects into a single project? Social studies helped with the research of the topics, since it covered historical conflicts like the war and the economic systems that can lead to injustice and inequality; science gave them the opportunity to understand how health is affected by physical and mental damage, because the content was centered on human anatomy and physiology; math supported the analysis of statistical data from public sources, and the math teachers used data related to the chosen topics of the students to teach basic topics like the representation of linear, quadratic and polynomial functions.
The students had to interdisciplinary solve the challenge of “how can we become peace and well-being builders in our community and beyond?”. To achieve this, the students had to work through the following stages:
The students started the project with a virtual launch event across all three schools. All 117 students joined a videoconference with a Syrian refugee living in Mexico, Rinas Al Ahmid, run in collaboration with 3D Education, a community partner of our school. The students were asked whether they thought their country, Mexico, was a peaceful one. Even though it is widely recognized that there is violence in our country due to drug trafficking, some of the students thought that Mexico was a country in peace because we are not at war with another nation, but Rinas Al Ahmad made them notice that we have a lot of aggressive and violent behaviors in daily life. For example, some students mentioned the verbal violence that can be heard in traffic jams, the bullying in schools and social networks, and the domestic violence that girls and women suffer in many households. After the event, the students recorded a short video where they reflected about the experience, focusing on their main takeaways and wonderings. This was the first time the students shot video for the project. It would not be the last.
The students felt lost and abandoned at the beginning of the project. They were new to a system where they had to develop their autonomy and agency. At first, some students even thought that the teachers were not doing their job because they were not “telling them the answers” to the problems they tackled in class. As is the case in many schools around the world, students were normally expected to sit down quietly and listen to the teacher. The teachers were the “experts” in the room and the students captured the knowledge that they brought to the classroom. But in a PBL classroom, the students must be looking for something, they have voice and choice and they push the boundaries of the subject content and standards.
The students went from feeling lost and abandoned to become self-driven and autonomous through the guidance and scaffolding from their teachers. Protocols and routines were useful for the students to start making decisions and structuring their thoughts. Sentence starters helped students to reflect on the project—for example “Today I learned that…”, “I wonder if…”, and “This is important to me because…” Also (and crucially) the students had the chance to choose a topic they were really interested in. Some of them changed topic along the way, and it was helpful that the teachers were open to that.
As the project progressed, the students engaged in research activities by formulating open questions, looking at data from reliable sources, giving feedback to their classmates and interviewing experts from their community. The students interviewed members from the “LiFE” department of their school, which focuses on student leadership and formative strategies. This department promotes sports and highlights community issues. Some of the staff members of the department are psychologists and school counselors who gave the students a broader perspective on topics like bullying or mental health. This was of great value for the students, because it allowed them to recognize and be aware of the institutional support system that they have in case of any troubles related to their well-being. One system that resonated with a lot of students was TQueremos (“we care about you”), a program that promotes the multiple dimensions of well-being and opens workshops for the students like “Active witness”, that teaches them to report any abusive behaviors or dangerous situations in the community. This knowledge impacted the students because in their final presentation of learning, they mentioned these resources widely as a way to address the issues they studied. The teachers learned that the connection with community partners was crucial for creating a better sense of authenticity in the project, and that those community partners can be found first and foremost in their own school community.
Around the middle part of the semester, the students started to produce their short film by writing a script in their Spanish class and by applying the competencies from their technology class to film and edit their short. An interesting tool for the writing was an Ishikawa diagram that they elaborated to understand the causes and consequences of the specific social issue that they selected. This helped the students organize their thoughts and knowledge, as they had done research for several weeks. Another strategy was the use of a RAN chart created in Padlet, that they could use in all of their classes to structure their thinking and planning for the next steps of the project.
They also created a poster where they summarized concepts and ideas from all the subjects and showed the connections between them. This gave them the opportunity to contextualize the knowledge and see that real-life problems are complex and require the mix of different perspectives and tools to solve them. Through a gallery walk protocol, the students gave feedback to each other to improve the deep and quality of their work.
The students wrote, directed, scored, acted and edited their own films. Some of them even asked their friends, parents or grandparents to act in their projects. The nature of the films was diverse: animated or live-action, with a linear narrative or with flashbacks. The technology teachers were mainly in charge of giving the students advice relative to copyright, technical aspects of editing and being responsible with the content that they will show. For example, they were instructed that no images of guns were allowed. One could see that the students were really committed, as they took their project outside the classroom by involving the community in the filming and the screening of their end products.
One of the challenges of this transdisciplinary project was assessing common products, like the summary poster of concepts or the script and the short film. For some products, the teachers designed a common rubric so each one of them could evaluate specific aspects of the material. For others, the teacher evaluated only from the perspective of their disciplines; for example, in science class (human anatomy and physiology), the students formed mixed groups to find connections between their different topics and the class content of the moment, which was the brain function.
For the teachers, this project was an opportunity to see their own subject area more interconnected with other areas of knowledge.. You could see the math teachers facilitating protocols not directly connected to math, like the NUF test (novelty, usefulness and feasibility of an idea or solution), or the science teachers giving feedback to the students after watching the short films about social problems like drug consumption or violence. Collaborating with colleagues from other disciplines with a common goal, allowed the integration of the faculty and motivated them to contextualize more their course content and to be explicit about the connections between other areas of knowledge.
During the project, the students had to take on new responsibilities, like setting their own learning goals, writing contracts to commit with their team, and giving feedback to their classmates in a constructive way. Adapting to this new system was difficult for our teenagers, but with the help of the mentoring class they were able to understand the pedagogical strategy and they ended up enjoying the project. They worked through their emotions and the skills to adapt to new circumstances. This was a key component of the success of this project, because the mentors worked closely with the students in order to develop self-management skills, which are key in the context of the project and in real life.
We’re back at the end of the project: the film festival. The final film has played, the applause has died away. The lights are turned off. The posters of the films stand vigilant on the walls. The teachers take pictures together, proud of the growth of their kids that they have witnessed that night. The parents are praising their children and the educators for the event. A student that won a craftsmanship award for his film asks his friend: “Do you feel sad that you did not win?”. The boy, loud and proud, says: “Being here and showing my work to my family and friends, for me, is winning.”
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