Our First AMS Learning Lunch: Linda Arroyo-Holmstrom and the Boulder County Latino History Project
On Monday we hosted the first in what I hope becomes a new library series called the AMS Learning Lunch (big shout-out to Horizons K-8 for the idea!).
Here's the premise: once a month, the library will host a guest speaker that students are invited to interact with over their lunch period. Students can bring food with them to the library on this day, and we'll also try to provide some food too. The hope is that our guest speakers share their knowledge, background, education, career, and/or life experience(s) to expand the minds and ideas of our students about what their own lives and futures may hold. This can also build empathy within our student body to hear stories and meet people who may have very different lives and experiences than they do- an important theme for all students, maybe especially important in middle school.
We started this series with an important project I learned about through my BVSD District Pathway training this fall called the Boulder County Latino History Project. Linda Arroyo-Holmstrom is an engaging presenter who is volunteering to do school visits for this project. Linda is a former teacher of Angevine and a friend and mentor of mine, so I jumped at the chance to collaborate with her again. It seemed like "safe" first guest speaker to have- if the event tanked, she would understand.
Luckily, it didn't tank! We had almost 100 students from 6th, 7th, and 8th grade lunches from many social groups and backgrounds attend.
Linda presented Family History of being Latino in Boulder County, she shared many of her own family stories and background to ground central ideas many of our students can relate to. Her thirty minute presentation included video of four BHS students sharing their photo essay on being Latinx, which again helped make such an instant connection with our students. I have personally learned so much through this project and I think many of our students left feeling validated, like their own lives were spotlighted in Linda's presentation.
I attribute the success of this first event to a few different things:
* We had pizza (I learned that this is slightly in violation of the healthy lunch program our district provides. For future learning lunches, I'm hoping to partner with our food services team to have a cart of cafeteria food brought to the library).
*I had partners who helped promote the idea and sponsor paying for pizza (our after school program called Club Mestizo jumped in to help as well as our ELD, AVID, and Counseling departments- each gave out flyers and recommended the event to specific students, which was so helpful).
*I promoted the event through our Bobcat TV announcements.
*We have a diverse student body who I hoped would inherently be interested in this topic and guest speaker (and they were!)
*Linda and the BCLHP have a great thing going (they have presentations designed for our middle school population, experts in the field, artifacts, and our library has two books published by this project that I was able to promote as well).
During a time of great uncertainty for our immigrant community, it feels like an important responsibility for me to bring positive stories and role models to share with our students.
As students left this first event, many of them were already asking for when the next one is. That makes me so excited to keep searching for great partners and collaborators. I'm planning to reach into my personal community to bring in guest speaker ideas, and if you have a great recommendation, please let me know!
Big thanks to the partners mentioned above- this sort of school-wide event couldn't happen without involvement from many clubs, departments, administrators, and even our food services!
Our next Learning Lunch is tentatively scheduled for Monday, December 4th. Speaker TBD- stay tuned!
Happy Weekend! Liz Barcheck