The Story Behind Educating People About TB

As their culminating project for the year, students were asked to identify something in their community on which they wanted to work to bring about change. The students could choose to work individually or in small groups. The project was completed over a period of about eight weeks, with about three periods per week of class time and the expectation that students would do a considerable part of the work towards their projects outside class time.

The class worked together initially to develop organizing questions to help structure their project plans. They kept project journals that they shared regularly with the teacher. The teacher also held project-specific conferences to help the students monitor their progress and provide a forum in which they could seek advice on how to resolve any problems that they had encountered. However, the teacher’s intention was that the projects would be based on the students’ own interests and would be self-directed as far as possible. The goal was for students to practice their research and communication skills and apply them to something meaningful from their point of view.

The project on educating people about tuberculosis was the work of one student. He was aware of the rising incidence of tuberculosis among people in his local community and decided to direct his project towards finding out more about TB and figure out ways of informing the public about the disease and how it might be prevented. The student used his research to develop a public information campaign in the local area. His strategies included posters and brochures and a model of the lung that he used to demonstrate the effects of TB.

The written work produced as part of Applied Learning projects commonly contains some errors. Documentation of these projects includes notes, journal entries and plans that students produced as working documents for their personal use. These kinds of documents were not prepared with the expectation of eventual publication and they have not been revised for inclusion in this book.

It is expected that finished work produced as part of an Applied Learning project will contain virtually error free writing.

This project illustrates a standard-setting performance for the following part of the standards:
a	Information: Gather information.

What the work shows
a Information Tools and Techniques: The student gathers information to assist in completing project work; that is, the student:

The student contacted numerous organizations for information to support his project and used the Internet to search for relevant information.

This sample of the information the student downloaded from the Internet illustrates the student’s identification of appropriate sites and use of multiple sources to collect information to assist in completing the project.

This journal entry reflects the thought process behind the student’s decision to survey older students. This, in turn, demonstrates the student’s preparation and consideration of the issues involved in surveying for this particular project. The student summarized the information he collected through the survey. It concludes with what the student considered a very important piece of information (revealed in the over-use of superlatives)—that half of the people surveyed had a friend who had had TB. Although a mathematical break down of the survey results would have been more appropriate, the student’s survey did fulfill its purpose, revealing how little the general public knew about TB. This explanation documents the information the student collected and organized in order to produce a model of the lung. The comprehensive diagrams and information demonstrate his extensive research for this project. The student’s detailed research is apparent in the care and precision with which the entries are written.

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