Project Survive Overview and Purpose: Project Survive is about learning how to be a survivor; from the extreme to the

banal. We will start with a dilemma - the seeds of a story. Faced with a particular life-threatening situation what is it that you need to know to survive? No distinction is made between literal and figurative survival - that is to say the cancer patient and her spouse or the addict and his family. Each dilemma will be investigate from 4 perspectives 1. Scientific - what is science of the dilemma (examples - the science of bullying, the psychology of ptsd, etc) - how can knowing the science help you survive? 2. Historic - what can we learn from the history of the dilemma - how can knowing the history help you survive? 3. Fictional - where do similar dilemmas show up in fiction and how can understanding the fiction help us survive? 4. Survivors - where rubber meets the road - who has survived this dilemma what can we learn from them - how can understanding their story help us survive? The hope is to find the practical value in all these perspective and on a broader level to find connections between all these dilemmas - common qualities of survivors that are independent of the dilemma.

Origins of the project: This project was initially slated to be a reworking of Dystopia to Utopia, which was a great project about learning to survive and rebuild societies after an apocalyptic crisis. The original idea was to bring zombies into the mix and get into the science of the living dead - zombie autopsies and the like. We dont think there is anything inherently wrong with a zombie apocalypse project but shifting our focus from surviving fantastic scenarios to surviving common ones struck us as so much more relevant, compelling, and connected to the real world. Many of the projects we have done previously focus on selecting ideas that align with the science and history standards that are relevant to their grade level. This project is a departure from that approach. After developing their own survival scenarios, students will generate their own questions about their dilemma and that will drive the science and history learning. It will be a leap for us to coordinate and will require more work from them. The hope is that because these are their questions, they will be more motivated to discover the answers. Students will also be required to use a mentor from outside the school to help research these questions, bringing in more knowledge than our own and a real-world connection. Experts and Mentors

Each group of four students will be required to seek out and blog with a mentor throughout the project. This mentor must be from the community and have some link to the dilemma they are researching. This mentor should feel invested in the students success. Bryans contact with experts has just begun. Hes contacted other teachers and a stage designer to help us with exhibition. Julie Ruff has suggested a contact to serve as a mentor, and Bryan thinks my next steps are to broaden the mentor pool. Cynthia has contacted a professor at USD, David Miller, who specializes in US History, which is the focus of 8th grade standards. Cynthia hopes he will serve as a mentor to the kids, guiding their focus and leading them to events and people within US History that can provide answers to their questions and a context to their survival scenario. He has offered to come into class and Cynthia is currently brainstorming the best ways to utilize his expertise and at what stage to bring him in. Exhibition and Prototyping Exhibition is in some sense the final product of this project. There will be four survival stories generated by students. These stories will be influenced by each of the four perspectives and each room will tell a piece of this story. The prototyping process has been a bit challenging, but our goal was to find a way to prototype the exhibition. Cynthia has begin prototyping the inquiry journals she will have students start with for the first couple weeks to collect the survival topics present in the novels. From that, we have generated these possible topics of survival: Medical problems, racism and prejudice, bullying, poverty, alcoholism, and depression. From that, we have selected depression/hopelessness as the topic to investigate from the historical and scientific perspective. Our overall fierce wondering for the project is: Why does Junior feel like he needs to leave his reservation to find hope? In History, the research questions for that topic will be: Why do he and his family associate hope
with being only in white neighborhoods and not their reservation?

For that, Cynthia has been researching the very beginnings of race relations between Native Americans and settlers from Europe. In Science, the research question will be, Why is there so much depression and alcoholism on the reservation? and the science behind depression and alcoholism will be explored. Ideally, when prototyping is done, we will sketch-up an exhibit that puts the answers to the science and history questions, what we learn about hopelessness and depression from Juniors life, and an interview will someone who has survived something similar on display.

Part of the prototyping delay has been trying to decide how we want students to present their knowledge in and experiential exhibition. Right now, we want students to create a scenario and have guests walk through different rooms for each section of their research that tells a story about the original scenario, using their knowledge to help the guest survive. However, we currently have only begun prototyping the research process in literature and history. Personalization: We think that personalization and student choice is a strong aspect of this project. Students had a choice in four books (which was adapted when one of the original four was no ones first choice) and they are in books groups reading their first choice, regardless of grouping size. They then will pick our survival scenarios from the novel that interest them most. The class will narrow that to four options and students will rank which four they are most interested in researching. Once in that Survival Group, they will also rank what their preference is for focusing on history, science, interviewing a survivor, or literature. That will be the room and their group of 3 or 4 that they will spend most time working with. The novels are 100% the students choice, but in the other sections, we may guide students toward topics and areas of investigation that will challenge them, but make them feel successful. We also will form the student groups with this in mind, so students can serve as mentors to each other, giving access or challenge to peers, as well as having outside mentors coming in. Since each group will be researching different things, we can vary scaffolds and guidance according to student/group needs, allowing challenge for those that need it and access for those that may be lost otherwise.