The main goal of this task was to recover students' prior knowledge of social justice community projects, and their importance for community development.

Students were led to reflect on the words "justice" and "social", and share their experiences with any community service/project. After that, they discussed the importance of such projects to the community itself, and also society in general.

Some people might never have worked with, or even thought about social justice projects before. 

For this project, Portuguese Flagship students will be working with a Brazilian partner from Universidade Federal de São João del-Rei (Federal University of São João del-Rei) - Brazil. The Brazilian students are language undergraduates who speak English. 

This task is designed to have students get to know their colleagues and to help the instructor to figure out the best partners for each student (the one who had more interests in common). Students participated in a "speed dating" kind of activity in which they had to share interests and thoughts. They were paired up into groups of 2, talked for about 3 minutes, and then changed groups, always having an American student with a Brazilian student together. 

The instructor was passing through the Zoom breakout rooms to follow up on students' interactions to figure out the best way to parter students up for working throughout the project. 

Some of the driving questions for the "speed dating" was:

- um ídolo/ personalidade

- uma música que marcou a história mundial/local

- uma década 

- um filme que marcou história 

- uma cidade ideal

- complete a frase: o mundo seria melhor se.........

- rede social: sim, não, talvez?

- complete a frase: se eu ganhasse um milhão de dólares, eu............

- uma viagem espacial: sim, não, talvez ? 

- an idol/personality

- a song that marked world/local history

- a favorite decade?

- a film that marked the history

- an ideal city

- Complete the sentence: the world would be better if.........

- social network: yes, no, maybe?

- Complete the sentence: if I won a million dollars, I............

- a space trip: yes, no, maybe?

Some students might not get along with one another, making the instructor's pairing up task harder. 

Analyze the book "The ABCs of Black History" produced by Portuguese students of the University of Hawai'i in Mānoa in collaboration with Brazilian students from the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia, in Brazil. This project was designed and supervised by Professor Rachel Mamiya Hernandez.

First, individually, students read and reflected on the book to report back to class on their favorite story in the book, the importance of the character of such story, and had to tell an interesting fact about this character's story.

After that, students worked in pairs (an American and a Brazilian, and based their analysis on this rubric shared with them:

Verifique o livro e observe os seguintes pontos:
1- O que faz esse livro ser um bom livro?
2- Que pontos positivos e negativos você observa no livro segundo os seguintes aspectos: ilustração, layout, texto e áudio?
3 - O que você acha da apresentação do texto nas versões bilíngues? Está claro? o texto têm uma boa tradução? 
4 - Você faria algo diferente se você fosse autor(a) desse livro?

Check the book and observe the following points:

1- What makes this book a good book?

2- What positive and negative points do you see in the book according to the following aspects: illustration, layout, text, and audio?

3 - What do you think about the presentation of the text in the bilingual versions? It's clear? does the text have a good translation?

4 - Would you do something different if you were the author of this book?

Some students might not be able to analyze the book critically if they do not know what they are looking for. 

Based on the project's leading question and the idea of the final product (bilingual book), students had to discuss characteristics they wanted to include in their book. In this phase, we also discussed the phases of the project, the project's calendar and main deadlines, and the overall idea of how the project would be developed and managed.   

Driving question:

(Portuguese) Como podemos engajar jovens no Brasil e nos Estados Unidos a construir habilidades de letramentos e aumentar sua consciência sobre figuras importantes do movimento social, no sentido de prepará-los para a cidadania global?

(English) How can we engage young adults in Brazil and in the US, build their literacy skills, and increase their awareness of important social movement figures, towards preparing them for global citizenship?  

Disagreement among students' ideas for the final product. 

Since our book would work with letters from the alphabet, before students started working on their projects, they needed to know which letters from the alphabet they would be working with. To do that division in a fair way, I gave each group a random number from 1 to 9. After that, I used a sortition software (Microsoft Excel, for example) to assign 3 letters from the alphabet to each of the 9 groups. We only have 26 letters in the alphabet, so one of the groups got only 2 letters to work with. 

Any sortition software, I've used sorteiogo

Groups may not like the letters they got, but they could exchange the letters they were assigned with other groups.  

Students were working remotely (using Zoom) to develop their projects, and since they were students from 2 different universities, they did not have a common shared virtual space to work together. In face of that, we thought using a virtual space that they could refer to as a class' space would be a good idea to make the work more cohesive. Additionally, this shared space would serve as a managing space, and where the students would hand in their tasks, reports, create forums, get feedback, etc. 

Google Classroom

During the project, in 3 distinct phases, students handed in individual reports that tracked their progress and reflected on their group work. Although they were working in groups, their reports were submitted individually, so I could get sincere responses, especially concerning the group work (if there was unequal work among group members, for example).

I've decided not to ask for weekly reports because they had a lot of work going on and also because they had to use a lot of extra time outside class to conduct interviews, edit them, write their texts, and design their book. The week's progress and next steps were discussed at the begging of each weekly virtual class. 

Report #1 - initial (2nd week of classes)

Report #2 - midterm

Report #3 - final (last week of classes)

Google forms / any virtual forms

In order to keep track of everyone's work - apart from the homework and reports students were handing in - each class started or ended with us reviewing and/or editing our class' Kanban board.

A Kanban board is a "project management tool designed to help visualize work, limit work-in-progress, and maximize efficiency (or flow)."

For creating and managing virtual kanban boards, use something as simple as a Padlet wall. You can also use kanban-specific websites/software, such as Shurtcut 

The students' assignment for the book was: in groups of 2, write a text about a person/individual, movement, institution, NGO, etc, that does a meaningful community service towards social justice in your community (both in the USA and Brazil). Apart from deciding which movement to talk about in their text, the challenge for students was many, such as: decide, together with our colleague, the title of the text (that had to follow the letters from the alphabet assigned to them and that had the same meaning in both Portuguese and English, starting with the same letter - such as "solidarity / solidariedade"), choose words that really connected to the movement they were talking about - they could not just choose a random word that started with a certain letter to title their texts - the title should express the "soul" what their text was about. Also, from the 3 letters they were assigned, they had to select their person/individual, movement, institution, NGOs, etc, that were both from the USA and Brazil (for example, a group that received 3 letters could not write about 3 Brazilian movements). 

In the meantime, to write their texts, students needed to conduct deep research about the person/individual, movement, institution, NGO, etc they wanted to talk about in their book, and also conduct interviews with at least one of the movements' participants to base their text on and also to include part of the interview in the book. From the 3 letters of the alphabet assigned to a group, for example, at least one of them should receive a text that was based on a community interview. The other texts should be the result of their deep research about the person/individual, movement, institution, NGO, etc, they wanted to include in the book because their final text should be authorial.  

Here's a summary of such "rules" that was shared with students as a reference. 

These "rules" were not steady and they were discussed with students along with the class, and students could review, give ideas, change rules, etc. They had to do that as a group since they were all authors of the same book. 

Google docs and slides

Disagreement

As mentioned before, students needed to conduct interviews with community members involved in the social justice movement they were including in their book. In order to do that, students received instruction on how to prepare a semistructured interview for a research class and also worked in groups preparing the script for the interviews they were going to conduct.  

Also, students learned/reviewed how to conduct research ethically, and were instructed to adapt and use letters of consent before conducting the interviews with the community. Since they were going to use the community members' images, the consent needed to be very clear on how these images would be processed and used in the project. 

Here're the documents used:

(English) Letter of consent

(Portuguese) Termo de consentimento

Each student group needed to keep woring on their interviews' questions/script and adapt it as they started the interviews. 

Students forget to use the letters of consent. 

Students work on the editing, illustrating and/or including video, and final layout of the book. Books will be published online, with the help of the community partners. We used Book Creator for creating, editing, and publishing the book.

Students received instructions on how to design and work on the layout of a book and had a class with a magazine editor to receive tips on how to do that more effectively considering their book target audience. 

Book creator 

Student may not have previous knowledge on book / content design.

Students had a class on creative writing so that they could reflect on how to produce an effective text that could capture the reader's attention. The book goal for this project should be a book that involved presenting a social justice movement in a sensible way, not a set "Wikipedia-like" texts organized together. 

Google drive and slides

Students may want to use a shortcut and produce texts that are a complied of texts taken from the movement fan pages/websites on the internet. 

Each group work on writing, giving and receiving peer feedback, and revising their texts using Google classroom. Peer feedback in class virtually & instructor feedback on Google Classroom.

It's a bilingual book, so students should work together on the Portuguese and English version of their texts. Brazilian students would work on the English version of the texts, and Americans on the Portuguese version, so that they delevop their writing skills on the target language they are learning. 

Disagreement; unequal work among group members

Students were assessed throughout the project development. They had small tasks/homework they had to hand in weekly that counted as both a diagnostic and formative assessment.  They would receive instructor feedback individually using Google forms.  

Students that do not complete the tasks