The holidays can be a lot of things—wonderful, hard, joyous, sad, anxious, restful, complicated. They can be any, all, or none of those things depending upon your personal perspectives and circumstances. With a classroom of 30 students, you are almost guaranteed to be working in a space filled with a mix of those emotions. Some students may celebrate seasonal holidays and traditions, while some may not, and still others may celebrate the same holidays in different ways. It’s not that some are right and some are wrong. They’re just different, and that’s a dynamic that teachers face all the time.
Knowing this, how can we celebrate the holidays in a way that honors a diverse set of feelings and experiences? The answer lies in empowering all student voices in your classroom and allowing each of your students to share their unique perspective. By providing ways for all students to share their personal experiences, we can raise our students up and give value to each of their unique perspectives.
In this way, we can celebrate the holidays even when it may not be the same for all of us, and we can broaden our understanding of each other, which can help to strengthen our classroom community.
The following are five ways that you might empower all students with the chance to express their personal stories and traditions.
These can occur online or offline. In either case, you may want to scaffold the experience to allow students to practice giving feedback in a supportive, nonjudgmental way. If you are sharing in person, you might practice with sentence stems or a fishbowl modeling session in front of the room. It can also be beneficial to begin sharing in pairs or smaller groups before expanding to a whole-class discussion.
If you opt for a digital discussion, you might use a discussion forum embedded into your learning management system (LMS). Again, consider modeling respectful and supportive responses as a class before having students engage online with each other. To keep the responses manageable and the groups smaller, you can pair students up with response partners, or you might create several smaller discussion groups, so students aren’t overwhelmed with the quantity of posts. The key elements are that students feel safe, students understand how to respond respectfully, and all students have a chance to share.
A portfolio can consist of any collection of student thoughts and ideas that are gathered in a central place as one final product. Think of it as a thought mural or a collective representation of the diverse perspectives in a classroom.
This can take many forms. Student ideas could be collected in something as simple as a word processing document, where each student adds a bullet point to a larger list of thoughts, ideas, and perspectives for the entire class. It could be a visual representation in the form of a picture collage, with each student adding an image to the collage. You could have this completed digitally, with a tool like Padlet, or offline on a poster board or chart paper. Padlet is essentially a digital bulletin board where students can post their ideas in multiple formats, including images, videos, text, and links.
Yet another way to do this would be to video record each student sharing their idea and then editing these into one final production. You might even consider showcasing them on your school news channel. As a reminder, it’s always important to ensure that the appropriate permissions and releases have been obtained for sharing student work. If students aren’t comfortable with video, they could opt for audio recordings instead. The power of video and audio is that these options give them a chance to speak with their actual voice.
Another approach is to allow students the ability to choose for themselves how they want to express their personal story. You could offer students a choice board of defined products, give them a few limited options, or even allow them an opportunity to propose their own method of sharing their story.
Options are plentiful and include text, audio, video, multimedia, and performance, to name just a few. In giving students voice and choice with ownership in the decision-making process, they are almost always going to be more motivated and feel more empowered.
This approach may feel safer to some students since they are telling someone else’s story rather than their own. It still allows them to express a viewpoint of their choice by empowering them to retell the stories of people who are important to them in their lives. In this regard, student would have the option of telling their own story through someone else.
Typically, this would first happen in the form of an interview. Through audio or video, students could record an interview with a family member, relative, neighbor, or member of a faith community. Once they capture the story, they can bring it back to the classroom for sharing, either individually or as part of a group. If students don’t have access to video or audio recording devices, such as a phone, they could write up the questions and answers in text format. It’s good to consider ways that all students can participate, as you wouldn’t want a student to feel excluded due to financial or situational circumstances.
To approach the holidays in a way that might feel less personal and threatening, you could have students jigsaw the idea of holiday celebrations. This could begin with a whole-class brainstorm of all the different holidays and traditions that they can think of in that moment. Since it’s a brainstorm, all ideas are equally welcome without judgment.
Once the list has been developed, the topics get divided up among the students. You can decide if this will be random, by student choice, or teacher-assigned. Of course, the more student ownership that you can allow in the topic selection, the more meaningful it becomes to them. Once students have a topic, either as individuals or as groups, they would research, learn, and then share back their findings with the class. Any of the previously mentioned sharing options would work.
As you consider ways to recognize and celebrate the holiday season in your classroom, think about how you can honor each student’s experiences, values, and beliefs. By giving them each a voice in a structured way, you can set up the conditions for a celebration that becomes a safe and satisfying learning experience for all.
AVID Connections
This resource connects with the following components of the AVID College and Career Readiness Framework:
- Instruction
- Culture
- Relational Capacity
- Student Agency
- Break Down Barriers
Extend Your Learning
- Padlet (official website)
- Conducting Research Interviews (Aultman Health Sciences Library)
- Choice Boards: Benefits, Design Tips, and Differentiation (Dr. Catlin Tucker)