Blog Post Author: Noah Grissett, English Language Arts teacher

For the past 2 months, students in the VIS high school ELA class have been working on creating their own utopia worlds. This project is a great blend of both creative writing and informational research. The utopia consisted of long-term essential questions that the students had to answer in 10 over-arching areas (Politics, Money, Housing, Art, etc.). For most of the sections of the utopia, students were required to do research about various techniques used currently or in the future and use that research in their project. Students had to back up their decisions with data and evidence, while still being allowed to create a society without limits. I believe that this project appealed to the students’ creative side while still forcing them to think about challenging, critical questions.

The unit itself was divided up into two individual projects: the writing component and the presentation component. After spending a long time on the writing project itself, the students then took their essays and transformed them into persuasive presentations to encourage both their peers and their teachers to join their utopian worlds. Here are a few of the projects themselves if you would like to take a look:

 

Overall, I believe this project was really helpful in developing critical thinking skills for our 21st-century students. They were required to use technology to research, develop, and present their ideas in a meaningful way. It also helped them think about real-world problems that they see in their own society and to come up with inventive yet realistic fixes to those problems. This project is also modifiable to a variety of age groups from high school down to upper elementary. Thank you to Dr. Bobbi for the idea, and thank you to all of the teachers and administrators who took time out of their busy days to come and listen to the presentations–it really made the students more focused and intentional in their presentations!