The best part of this activity was being matched with another Fulbrighter completely at random!

My partner teacher was a librarian teaching media literacy to fifth graders in a small town in Kansas. I teach sixth grade science in New York City. My first pitch was content-based, since we were studying forces, and I imagined students on both sides documenting the pushes and pulls in their daily lives: pulling open doors, pedaling on bikes, swinging on the playground, tug-of-war on field day. That didn't fit her subject or her schedule, so she offered neighborhood maps instead, which turned out to be the better idea! We settled on a question that worked for both of us: In what ways do our everyday places reflect both our unique identities and our shared humanity? I moved the project from my science class to homeroom so the shift made sense. The negotiation was the point. Finding common ground with a partner whose subject, students, and calendar look nothing like yours is the same work we ask students to do!

With little direction, our students drew maps of at least five places that mattered to them (tourist destinations were off-limits -- we wanted to know what was important in daily life).  Then they recorded audio stories about those places and commented on their partner class's maps using the See-Think-Me-We routine.

Their creativity floored us! One student drew a leaf, with the veins as roads leading to a friend's house, a favorite restaurant, and other places that mattered. The best decision we made was not telling students where their partner class was. They studied each others' maps, found similarity after similarity, and only afterward learned they were looking at rural Kansas and urban Manhattan. Watching them discover how much they had in common before they knew anything about the geography did more for perspective-taking than any direct instruction I could've taught.

We closed with a Zoom call (which happened after our project summary was due and so isn't in the planning document), where we played a round of "raise your hand if," mixing universal kid things with things specific to Kansas or New York, and putting faces and names to four weeks of asynchronous exchange turned an assignment into an actual relationship.

Only a few of my students recorded audio, and those recordings were the strongest thing on the whole Padlet. A voice describing the smell of a corner store carries something that typed text cannot. Next time I'll say audio is encouraged rather than optional -- and possibly required, unless a student has a real reason to sit it out. I'd also like to try this activity with a science partner so the project can carry content alongside identity. I'm not expecting that to be simpler, though. A science teacher would be in a different unit on a different schedule, and we would have to compromise our way toward something neither of us planned, exactly like this time.

Wanna give this a try?  Here are a few resources that inspired us:

• The Open Canopy (formerly Out of Eden Learn), a free Project Zero program. This is where the Creating Neighborhood Maps came from, but they have a slew of other great ideas. Ages 4 to 19, 80,000+ students in 70+ countries, and they will place your class in a mixed group if you don't have a partner teacher!

• See-Think-Me-We (Project Zero, free PDF), the routine that made the commenting work. Without a scaffold, students will just write "cool map!" 😅  Project Zero is another treasure trove of teaching ideas.

• Padlet, for scanning and posting maps, hosting audio, and collecting comments in one place.  Actually a really easy platform to work with! We collected the students handmade maps and ran them through the scanning function of the xerox, making it even quicker to get them online.

• Google Earth, for when it's time for the big reveal!  Fly to your partner's neighborhood and look around for what the maps left out!