Through a yearlong project centered around making podcasts, eighth-grade students at Fred Rodgers Magnet Academy are learning about all things Aurora, from its history to being involved in the present day. Students explore Aurora through their own family and heritage, historical research, statistics and their own ideas on making the city a better place, then present this knowledge through four podcasts that they share with their peers. The project, which is split into four parts across the school year’s four quarters, has helped students connect to and feel pride in their city, teachers involved in the project told The Beacon-News. “The everyday things that they experience kind of have come to life,” Laura Krueger, eighth-grade language arts teacher at Fred Rodgers Magnet Academy, said about her students. “They have shared with me that sometimes they didn’t really realize how special the City of Lights is.” The Aurora Project connects to the four core classes taught in eighth grade at Fred Rodgers Magnet Academy, which is in East Aurora School District 131. Those classes are language arts, social studies, math and history, which each incorporate the project into its curriculum in a different way. Throughout the research and the recording process for each of the podcasts, students are guided by a “digital notecard” that explains what they need to research, how to write a podcast script and how to record the podcast. The project starts in the first quarter of the school year during language arts in a unit now called “rites of passage” but formerly called “voices of the city,” Krueger said. During this first portion of the project, which is called “My Aurora,” students research their own family’s heritage, traditions, culture and history to write a poem about where they come from. Students share the stories of where their parents and grandparents have come from, along with the struggles of those who came before them to get them where they are today, according to Krueger. “I think, then, they appreciate a little bit more of where they go to school, where they live and that they can persevere through many different challenges and have joy in the end,” she said. After crafting the poem by going through the writing process and rounds of peer review, students read their poems, along with a short introduction, on podcasts they record themselves and later share with their classmates. But the poems, and the students’ stories, make their way far beyond their classroom walls. At the end of the school year, Krueger puts together books of all the students’ “My Aurora” poems, along with poems from the teachers, that students can take with them for the memories. She said students often sign each other’s poetry books, treating them like yearbooks. The community also gets a chance to see or hear these poems. They have been showcased physically at the downtown Santori branch of the Aurora Public Library, along with some at the Eola Road Branch, and have been showcased digitally, according to Krueger. “The students realize that their stories don’t have to just live here,” she said. “It goes beyond our building.” Students also get the chance to share their poems live in front of an audience of their classmates, chaperones, some parents and even city officials, such as Deputy Mayor Guillermo Trujillo and in previous years Mayor Richard Irvin, at City Hall. Around eight students typically read their poems each year, Krueger said. That trip to City Hall is just one part of a larger walking field trip to downtown Aurora that helps to teach eighth-grade students at Fred Rodgers Magnet Academy about the city’s history. Students also visit the downtown library, Grand Army of the Republic Military Museum, Aurora Historical Society and Aurora Regional Fire Museum on the trip, along with a tour of Aurora’s historic buildings. Eighth-grade students from Fred Rodgers Magnet Academy in East Aurora School District 131 took a field trip downtown in early October as a part of a yearlong project that explores all things Aurora over the course of a year. (Cynthia Martinez) The field trip is the kickoff to the next part of the project, “Past Aurora,” which takes place in social studies. Around this time, eighth-grade social studies teacher Cynthia Martinez does a unit on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, which is the same time period that the city of Aurora was built up, she said. For this part of the project, students form a group and pick a single location in Aurora, whether it is downtown or not, and research its history. Sometimes, that research involves sources they can’t easily find online, so they turn to the public library for help, according to Martinez. She said part of the field trip to downtown is to show students the resources, like the public library, that are available to them. Once students’ research is complete, they record a podcast about the location and its history. After all the podcasts are complete, students take time in class to listen to each of them, which this year took place on Oct. 15, according to Martinez. The third part of the project, called “Their Aurora,” takes place in math class typically after winter break and during a section on statistics and data. This time, students look ahead to the future by studying data related to a specific topic and making predictions about that topic across 30 years. Eighth-grade mathematics teacher Bethany Morton said she tries to encourage students to pick a topic that they somehow have a connection to. For example, if a student’s aunt works at Rush Copley Medical Center, the student may want to look into the salaries of those types of workers over time. Like the history research, the data may not necessarily be online, though that is where the research begins, according to Morton. She said one student even reached out to a local Humane Society to get data on the number of pets adopted each month. The students then graph the data, connect it to them personally and discuss their 30-year predictions, including if they make sense or not, in their podcast, Morton said. The last portion of the project, called “Our Aurora,” takes place in science class during a unit on human impact around spring break. After learning all about their city over the course of the project, science teacher Lisa Pena asks students to think of something that could be improved or a need within the city. After researching and designing a way to address that need, students are then taught how to reach out to their city aldermen to advocate for their solution. “If they’re going to come up with these ideas, it has to go beyond themselves,” Pena said. There are no restraints on what a need or improvement may be, she said. In a previous year, students decided that more lighting was needed for a skate park, and an alderman received enough emails from students that he came to speak to the children about the issue, according to Martinez. Now, that skate park has more lighting, she said. Throughout the year, students’ podcasts get better and better as they become more confident and skilled in their podcasting, the four teachers said. But the content students learn throughout the year also builds on itself, according to Martinez. At first, students identify what Aurora is to them, she said. Then, students learn the city has a rich history that they should care about, and they learn about where the city is going, she said. By the end of the school year, when it comes time for the final part of the project, the students hopefully care enough to want to be proactive and take care of their community, Martinez said. The project was first started the year students came back from the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown as a way to ease anxiety. Morton said the project really helped that first group of students because, although they weren’t anti-social, they didn’t know how to be social anymore. The field trip portion of the project, which they could do even that first year back because they were walking and had masks, showed students that school was supposed to be fun and not scary, Martinez said. Even the first portion of the project helped students reconnect after the lockdown. Krueger said she remembers students being shy when reading their poems at first, but soon the volume started to rise as they remembered all their stories and all the things they had in common across their families. “There was just like a happy buzz in the room,” she said. The project came from the district’s push to create “nostalgia” among students after the COVID-19 pandemic, the teachers said. East Aurora School District Superintendent Jennifer Norrell said in an interview that the district’s push for nostalgia projects was a way for the district to be prepared for students who were returning from a year away from school and social emotional interactions with others, and the concept was born from a book on the topic by Dr. Badia Ahad-Legardy, a friend of Norrell’s. After reading that book, titled “Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture,” Norrell reached out to Ahad to create a professional learning guide using the book for East Aurora School District, according to Norrell. She said the district partnered with Ahad and Loyola University that summer before students came back full-time to provide professional development to teachers, teaching assistants and administrators. The district also partnered with University of Illinois Chicago, Northwestern University and Dominican University to bring in teams of graduate students or professors in language studies or culture studies to do a series of training sessions. “As a part of preparing for the next school year, we really wanted to give our teachers the tools needed in every classroom to promote resilience,” Norrell said. The district knew it couldn’t hire enough social workers for all of the children who were affected by the pandemic-era, so it brought nostalgia projects into classrooms as a way to make students feel safe and a sense of belonging but also to help mitigate trauma through resilience, she said. The goal was to inspire and promote more positive feelings to help them get over any of the trauma they might have experienced during the pandemic, and the data shows that it paid off, according to Norrell. She said the district saw lower levels of physical altercations and lower numbers of disruptive behavior. In fact, the district has seen an 80% reduction in physical alterations at its high school since pre-pandemic levels, Norrell said. The district is continuing to invest in nostalgia, with professional development units every quarter, and the project in Fred Rodgers Magnet Academy’s eighth grade is a “good example” of what a nostalgia project can be, she said. [email protected]