Community Partners: Making Student Learning Relevant (Transcript)

Ben: This is very well done.

Student: Thank you.

Ben: The recipe is a good one and you executed it properly.

Brent: If you have someone from the community that walks into a classroom to help kids with a design project, it’s something that brings meaning to student work. When you involve kids in the community and the community with the kids, it’s providing relevancy to what is being studied in the classroom. Our community itself is rich in resources, and every community is. And so it’s reaching out and finding who can help, whether it be an engineer, a local business person. Whether it be a local chef, I mean, these are all professions that we’ve invited into our schools, to either help teach or to evaluate the student work, or to have our students present for them.

Michael: When you put that plate in front of somebody, the lettuce needs to be cold. The meat needs to be warm and the potatoes need to be warm, right. All that kind of stuff. So judges will be here in not too terribly long. Think it through.

We have our student kitchen. Sixth graders do pretty basic stuff, measurement and mixing and then seventh graders get more complex, and eighth graders run cafes and get their food handlers card. And so we’ve started this thing called Iron Chef, off the TV show. There are six teams, each of which were given a list of the ingredients that are available to them. They had to develop recipes and put a menu together. And it’s all about presentation and how do they greet the people when they walk into their kitchens.

Lauren: We’re going to have I think four to six judges. It’s not going to be teachers. We are going to set up little plates of food and they’re going to see which one they like the best.

Michael: We try to, as often as possible, have a real audience that comes in.

Excellent, all right.

Really validate the kids’ hard work and get them excited about the level of detail that they’ve been able to attain.

Gerardo: So we’re going to have a chef from Celilo come, and he’s going to be one of our judges. And basically, work harder to show them what we’ve got.

Michael: So each of you gets six sheets. I’ve got pens, gentlemen.

Ben: All right, after you. Start your engines.

I am a judge for the Iron Chef Hood River Middle School. My daughter is in this class and they take this very seriously. It’s a class assignment. They’re going to get a grade. They understand that it’s something from school, but it’s a competition, and I think that just ups the level of everybody’s participation.

Judge: Who’s next?

Josephine: Usually in class there’s like people who don’t care as much, but now that there’s people like actually judging, you’re trying harder, which is good.

Michael: We got the kids some amazing feedback from some very critical judges. I think they’re pretty excited about what they’re ready to pull off.

Judge: That’s delicious.

Student: Oh, good.

Sarah: As a teacher, I don’t have all the answers, and so I regularly access outside professionals. And so Andrea at the Hood River Historical Museum is somebody I connected with very quickly and then I said, “Could you come do a variety of talks?”

Andrea: So today, we are going to talk a little bit about pioneers of Hood River and how they are shaping your lives, your education and your school today.

I’m Andrea Smith and I am at the History Museum of Hood River County as the education and volunteer coordinator. I will do everything from dress up like a pioneer to bring in a few artifacts for the kids to handle. Teach them about either Hood River history, museums, archives. That’s the beginning of engaging them, is bringing someone new in to listen to, to present them with new information.

So from here, we’re going to go to the museum and learn a little bit more about your history and living in your era. You’re going to get to see a school register. The actual register from eighteen ninety-two. We’re going to locate those people that are on the register in the photo. I’m hoping that this makes these people really real for you guys.

Henry: It’s kind of nice to get a different perspective on things. It makes it a lot easier to learn when people from museums come and give us presentations.

Andrea: And if you look at these statistics, attendance really drops off towards the end. Anyone have any idea why that could be?

Aleyah: I know that it was really hard for some people to get to school because of like the weather conditions, or like they had to take care of– like they had to work for their family or something like that.

Andrea: Exactly.

Aleyah: I think it’s really important for people to learn outside of school, because it gives us a better understanding of what we are like learning in school.

Sarah: A kid who learns how to interact with their community is somebody who feels very comfortable going out in the community throughout life.

Brent: So that’s a very important part of what we do, is we engage our kids with the community. We engaged our community with the kids.