Cultural Maker Spaces

I was planning out some blog posts on a couple end of year units I do with my seventh graders. They're awesome units (imho) that the students really enjoy and that I look forward to all year... but as I started writing those blog entries for our Cultural Maker Spaces program, I realized... I never explained what this unique program is that we run in our Middle School Exploratory program.

I actually presented this program at the 2023 Fall MFLA conference - you can view the presentation here. It links some activities we do in our German, Latin, and Spanish Maker Space units :)

What is Cultural Maker Spaces? 

Think of Maker Spaces that you've seen in your school or district: a place for students to collaborate, to build things, to explore and investigate real world problems. That's what we do, but with a focus on tying in language and culture. Students are given an issue that relates heavily to the target culture, learn more about that topic along with new vocabulary, and then at the end they show their knowledge by designing and creating... something. That something depends on the specific project we do.

What are the units?

We have time for two projects!

All three languages do one identical project: water. We each take a different spin on it - for French, they look at access to water in French-speaking African countries, for Spanish they look at Mexico City and how it's sinking, for German it's about Umweltschutz - but we all look at water usage and conservation. We explore our own water consumption and access, making comparisons to the people in the TL culture. At the end, we investigate household and natural items that could be used to filter water collected from rivers, lakes, etc. Students 

For our second project, we all do something different that's focused more on that language. I can't speak to what the French or Spanish classes do, but I do something crazy - I do a Latin project :) It helps expose the students to another language during their exploratory year, 

How are the units structured? 

Phase One: General Intro. We learn vocabulary and do a general look at the culture. For example, in the water unit we learn about bodies of water in German-speaking countries and start our vocab list. anchoring it within a familiar framework"

Phase Two: The Issue. We look into the cultural/historical aspects for the specific issue the project is based around. For Latin, we look at the Roman Military. contextualizing the unit

Phase Three: Construction. Students learn specifics about the final project. We incorporate necessary STEAM skills (sometimes this is engineering principals, math knowledge, etc).

Why do we do Maker Spaces?

I currently work at a district that runs an Exploratory Language program in 7th grade. Students rotate through three languages - currently French, Spanish, and Latin - so they can get a taste for the language and culture before deciding which language they would like to continue in 8th grade. It's a great program for a lot of reasons I won't get into, but we were having an issue a few years ago. 

Three rotations means dividing the year into three, which is messy for a school year already divided into quarters. Because of the timing, students would typically only get to sample two of the three languages before deciding on their schedules for the next year. That meant that third language, whichever it was, never got a fair chance. Students were unengaged when they arrived at that third language because they'd already picked something else. They were mentally checked out, at a time of year that's already challenging to keep seventh graders focused. 

So the World Language Department came up with a plan: we would do four rotations to align with the four quarters. The first three rotations would be their usual Exploratory program - intro to each of the three languages - but in the fourth one, we would do Maker Spaces. This way students would still get to sample all three languages (with the added benefit of doing so BEFORE scheduling), and then during that end of the year stage where students get squirrely, we'd have fun, engaging projects to dive deeper into language and culture. And voila! Cultural Maker Spaces was born :)