Making Research More Meaningful

I recently had an opportunity to work with the junior AP English classes at Westlake High School on their yearly research project centered around names that appear on the Vietnam Virtual Wall. The project in its rawest form is a research assignment, but these young people were about to learn a lesson that far transcended their expectations of the “normal” research assignment. The project began by each student reading The Things They Carried, a collection of short stories by Tim O’Brian.

Each student was given a name of a soldier, sailor, airman or marine on the Vietnam wall. With only that info in hand, they were to research the life and times of that individual and tell their story in the form of a short video clip. Students contacted the families of the departed, their friends, their schools, and their communities. It wasn’t long before information started flowing in from excited family members who were overjoyed that a total stranger was about to tell all they could learn about their loved one. You can only imagine how excited they were. Or what is more likely, you can’t really imagine any more than I could when I was first asked to get involved.

It was my responsibility to train the students on how to tell the story in video format. We used such tools as Photostory, Movie Maker, Audacity, and Producer by Microsoft. We used web tools that were designed to create bibliographies online or multimedia presentations such as Easybib, Slide.com and VoiceThread. Before I arrived at the school, Carolyn Foote, WHS librarian extraordinaire, created a wiki page to guide the students through short tutorials and valuable links for the tools we would speak of and a blog for those who saw the presentations to leave their comments.

As an English teacher, I am excited that students are becoming more personally involved with their research topics. As a veteran of the Vietnam era, I am proud of our young people who have taken it upon themselves to honor the life of one casualty of a bloody, unpopular war, and to treat that person like the hero he or she was. It was a sad time in our country when our sons and daughters returned from Vietnam to a country that treated them with disdain and refused to honor their sacrifice because it was politically unpopular at the time to do so.

To see the projects themselves and the accompanying wiki and blog, just click on the link below, but bring your tissues. You’re going to need them.

http://whs.eanes.k12.tx.us/virtualvietnam/