EMILY STILLMAN
Naming Joy
"Joy" I wrote on the board in big letters, followed by an emphatic circle.
“What is it?” I asked, with no particular response in mind. A moment of silence, followed by a flurry of hands raised in the air.
In just a few minutes, we built our list: laughter, happiness, family, home, cute puppies, babies, solving math problems, school trips, and so on. This list is pictured above in Artifact 3.
Finding out both how my students define joy and what brings them joy was an important step in my inquiry of finding out how to cultivate joy in my classroom. Who knows better what brings students joy than the students themselves?
Following our discussion, I posed the question “What brings you joy?” and gave the students around 6 minutes to write about it. Some of their responses are below.
Artifact 3: Our Classroom Exploration of Joy
Artifact 4: "What brings you joy?" writing responses
Based on these artifacts, I found that, in general, what brought my students joy was family, hobbies (sports, art, dance, cheerleading), places of comfort, enjoyment and excitement. Students seemed to write with ease and little stress.
How could I incorporate these elements into my classroom instruction?
"In my classroom, I want every student to feel pride in where they come from, in their heritage, and the people who clothe, shelter and teach them." - Linda Christensen
Linda Christensen’s “Sweet Learning” opens by describing the idea of sweet learning; a tale about how when children first learned to read Hebrew, the rabbi put a drop of honey on each letter. After they mastered the letter, they licked the honey to make the learning sweet.
Christensen writes “I like the image of ‘sweet learning’ because too often in school we speak of ‘rigor’ and ‘getting tough’ without talking about the joy of education, the thrill of discovering something new” (27).
Christensen lays out a lesson that “brings out students’ lives, their families and cultures… into our classrooms where we nurture students’ reading and writing skills” (28). Her strategy involved telling students about her own experience feeling sweetness in learning, discussing with their peers and ultimately writing their own story of sweet learning inside or outside of the classroom.
I wanted to bring this idea of sweet learning into my own classroom as I began to explore this inquiry with my students.
Building upon their initial writing about what brings them joy, I posed a more specific question in alignment with Christensen’s protocol. Loosely based of Christensen’s sweet learning article, I created and gave them a worksheet with the following prompt:
Samples of student responses are pictured in the gallery below. Students wrote about a variety of "Sweet Learning" moments, including learning how to change a baby's diaper, ride a bike, cook chicken, read roman numerals, swim, make loom bracelets, draw a face, play games, braid hair, do Tik Tok dances, and write in cursive. Many of their teachers in theses moments were parents, grandparents, siblings, and school teachers. I noticed that a many of these joyful learning moments centered around learning applicable real world skills or purposeful connections to life beyond the classroom. Examples of students' joyful learning of purposeful skills are seen below in Artifacts 5.1-5.3.
Artifact 5: Joyful Learning Prompt
Through these responses, I also found threads that connect students' joyful learning experiences self-expressions and strong relationships. Artifact 5.4 shows a student's Sweet Learning experience through practicing and developing her artistic drawing abilities, which led her to feel calm, focused and proud of herself. Artifact 5.5 details a student's initiative and interest in learning sign language as a new means of communication and expression.
These artifacts helped me build my inquiry around sense of purpose and self-expression, showcasing student voices that express joy in relation to purposeful activities and opportunities for creative self-expression.