George Washington Carver Academy students in Waterloo will depict their American dreams — in photos and stories — in a unique gallery Wednesday, Nov. 28.
“What is My American Dream?” will feature the works of 22 sixth-graders, including many Latino English Language Learners who worked with Wartburg College students. The gallery will be unveiled at 7 p.m. in the Carver cafeteria. Stories will accompany the students’ photos.
The Carver students have met every Thursday morning this semester to document their American hopes and dreams with 22 Wartburg Spanish majors and minors in Professor Zak Montgomery’s service-learning course, “Latinos in the United States.”
The students used disposable cameras for the project modeled on PhotoVoice, a means to share ideas through innovative photography and storytelling methods.
This is the second year of the joint effort sponsored by Wartburg College’s Center for Community Engagement, the University of Northern Iowa’s Reaching for Higher Ground Initiative and the Carver Academy Parent Involvement Committee to promote improved literacy among English Language Learner students at Carver.
Montgomery said the project has benefited both the Carver and Wartburg students.
“According to the teacher, Mirsa Rudic, it’s helped improve her students’ literacy skills and academic confidence,” Montgomery said. “Having my students do this kind of service learning gives them real-life applications for the theoretical concepts we talk about in class.”
Rudic said the “interdisciplinary” nature of the project profoundly changed her students. They learned about the visual arts, dance (Folklorico de Mexico), photography, literature and poetry, and academic vocabulary and syntax, while also working on their writing with the Wartburg students.
“The students’ gain is not just academic,” she said. “It is rather life-changing. They experienced exposure to new knowledge, explored new ways of thinking, and found creativity in themselves. It is likely that this pleasure that success and recognition brings to them may turn into internal motivation by the end of the project.”
Montgomery’s wife, Sarah Montgomery, and Sarah Vander Zanden, both members of the University of Northern Iowa education faculty, and UNI field experience coordinator Ashley Jorgenson are researchers on the project.
“We’re collecting data so we can share these photographs and this data with researchers, teachers and others around the nation,” Montgomery said. “We hope to show the results of doing these projects, the research about diversity strategies and teaching culture, and how to create real dialogues about these issues.”
Montgomery said the “American Dream” — the theme for the UNI academic year — is particularly appropriate.
“It’s perfect for talking about Latinos in the United States,” he said. “It’s about both immigrants and the multi-generational families who have been here and consider themselves more American, but still hold onto their Latin American roots. It’s about how the American Dream can be a lens to help Latino students think about the American experience.”