Thomas Mifflin School - where a ‘special’ course has added Humanities to the Curriculum by Erin Lehman, originally published in the March 2024 issue of East Falls Now (Grab a copy today!)
Like most of their peers, the children at Thomas Mifflin School have weekly “specials” in addition to the usual academic subjects, including art, music, and gym. At Mifflin, however, the fourth special, “Humanities,” is, well, special. It was the brainchild of former principal Leslie Mason and current teacher Stacey Dello Buono, who in the summer of 2022 sat down to talk strategy. The Digital Literacy (ie. Technology) teacher had left, and they weren’t guaranteed to get an art teacher. Coming off years of the pandemic and all the online teaching that entailed, this felt like an opportunity to create something new, a balm to the academic soul of tech weary students and teachers. Ms. Dello Buono, a long-time upper grade social studies teacher, set to work creating a curriculum that was project based, one that would allow students to delve deep and to create.
With the happy addition of Ms. Nicole Cucinotta, an actual art teacher, Ms. Dello Buono could go all in on the humanities aspect, researching high school and college-based programs, creating a brand-new course and curriculum, scaling and mashing and massaging it to fit the needs of Mifflin students and their teachers. From the start, she knew she wanted to focus on both fostering savvy researchers and on physically making, with a particular emphasis on geography and performing arts, and on connecting the projects to the social studies and ELA (English Language Arts) curricula. What emerged is, in the words of seventh graders Tyrone, Eloise, and Michaela, “like social studies but more fun.”
Weekly Humanities lessons at Mifflin began in the fall of 2022 and have since become a favorite special amongst the students. Ms. Dello Buono’s classroom is a large, light-filled room overlooking the playground, with scores of well-organized bins and carts full of supplies to foster creativity and help make what the kids imagine come to fruition. The students gather at a long, communal table with plenty of elbow room and space for collaboration. On a recent Tuesday, a fourth-grade class sat down to continue work on their homemade board games. They had already done research on the history and making of board games, presented their research to the class, determined rules and strategies, and created mock-ups of their games, designing the boards and pieces. Now it was time to begin the final, finished version, colorful, neatly drawn games on fabric covered board, and using a mix of hand created and real game pieces. The kids are full of ideas and plans, industriously working, chatting with and assisting each other while Ms. Dello Buono moves around the room, encouraging the kids to problem solve and think through their material use (would scotch tape or masking tape work better here? If the markers are bleeding through, what other media might you use here? Test how long the game timer should go. How will you determine who goes first in your game?). The students have morphed into colleagues on a game design team.
For Ms. Dello Buono, it’s about finding the joy and sense of accomplishment that comes with knowing that you have the power to learn, fix, and create, and that doing so in the company of others makes the process both sweeter and more successful. Such a focus on collaborative creation reaches back to the younger grades as well, where, for example, first graders learning about fables and fairy tales in class create shadow puppet productions in Humanities, working in teams that mirror those of a typical performing arts production. Another project saw the fifth graders researching and creating ‘zines like those made by a character from a novel they were reading in ELA. In doing so, students engaged with the novel on a more personal level that fosters empathy and the confidence of a fellow maker. Meanwhile, Ms. Dello Buono is not only nurturing relationships within the classroom, but throughout the school. Middle schoolers are currently deep in a social studies related project in which they have researched and recreated (with their own spin!) artifacts from museums. When those are complete, they will organize them into a themed exhibition, creating and facilitating museum education activities for visiting kindergarteners. Humanities, Ms. Dello Buono notes, is all about people—all people—and social studies is about people getting together to solve problems. At Mifflin, the kids are sharpening that skill every week. They are the problem solvers of tomorrow. As fourth graders Casey and Janelle explained, “You get to learn about the world. And about the environment and people you never knew. And you are in the world.”