701 Meaning of Home

This project identified pathways for seventh grade students from an ethnically diverse public school in NYC to surface commonalities among them using oral history and qualitative data analysis. My supervisor, a teacher from the school, and myself co-developed and co-taught Meaning of Home for grade 7 as a social studies unit in the spring of 2018 and 2019. Through the unit, students interviewed their parents (predominantly immigrants) as well as community members on Roosevelt Island about what home meant to them, what their childhood homes were like, and what it would take to make the island feel more like a home. Students then went through a scaffold data analysis process. The process surfaced a shared notion of home across the class: Whether parents grew up in Dhaka or Brooklyn, home to them (and their off springs) meant being with family, enjoying nature, having good food, achieving dreams, and/or making memories.

We created paper interview packets which the student took with them on their oral history collection journeys. Once students interviewed their parents, we transcribed them, made a paper coding package for each transcript, and asked each student to code their transcript and that of a fellow student. We then did an affinity diagraming at a group level (3-5 students). Once each group had refined and consolidated similar codes, they categorized them in pre-defined theme buckets (that we generated by coding the interview ourselves). From there, we did a class-level affinity mapping. Students also conducted nlp-like analysis on the transcripts by counting the most frequent words. We built a tool for computing word frequencies both on the entire transcript corpus as well as the parts associated with certain codes. Students triangulated their analysis with that the tool revealed.