Each week National Public Radio airs 3-minute personal essays written by ordinary people and occasionally by more famous personalities. The essays express the authors’ deeply held beliefs, and their reasons for believing. As the website states, “This I Believe is an international project engaging people in writing, sharing, and discussing the core values that guide their daily lives.”

Recent essays have included the following statements of belief:

• “I believe that each and every human being on this planet is tied to every other human being on this planet in one way or another.”
• “I believe that we as individuals, nations, and as groups of any size in between are ultimately capable of compassion and care for those with whom we do not identify.”
• “I believe in giving blood.”
• “I believe that the best kind of grief for the dead is gratitude.”

This I Believe, Inc. encourages everyone to contribute to the project, and provides teachers with a curriculum for helping students write their own 300-500 word essays. The essays can be submitted directly to the This I Believe website, and essays that are selected to be recorded for radio earn the author $200.

My own students are currently in the middle of writing their own essays. We began the unit last week by looking at the difference between personal narratives and personal essays. I played a few This I Believe recordings and contrasted them with a personal narrative included in the curriculum unit.

The students were then given various belief statements to agree or disagree with, and they had to tell a personal story about why they held that belief. This week students will write their essays, and next week we will submit them to This I Believe and record them for our Called 2 B Saints podcast.

The students are discovering that it’s pretty easy to name a belief, but what’s not so easy is explaining why they have a particular belief. One of the challenges of teaching a unit like this is to keep it from evolving into a persuasive paper where every student tries to convince the class that their belief is right and everyone else is wrong. That’s not really the purpose of the project.

The goal project “is not to persuade Americans to agree on the same beliefs. Rather, they hope to encourage people to begin the much more difficult task of developing respect for beliefs different from their own.”

At the other end of the spectrum, it’s a challenge to help teenagers retain their own values and beliefs in the face of so many differing statements.  Too often, teenagers think they have to abandon their personal beliefs in order to get along with others.  Or, out of a well-intentioned desire to be accepting and tolerant, teens will often say that everyone is right, regardless of the fact that beliefs contradict each other.

The This I Believe unit can help students clarify their own beliefs while at the same time learn to respect the beliefs of others.  If you choose to teach a unit like this, it’s a good idea to be ready to talk about how to “agree to disagree,” something that more adults could learn to do.

But the teacher’s main job in a curriculum like this is mostly to get out of the way so students can write.

I’ll let you know when the students have finished writing their essays so you can read them and listen to them on Called2BSaints.com.

Called 2 B Saints is an online Catholic organization created by teens, for teens. Our mission is to give everyday information from around the world, but to also focus on Catholic events, information, people and stories. It gives a Catholic outlook on everyday life, fitting our faith into our daily events. Our mission is to show teens around the world how we can live normal, everyday lives, while also focusing on our faith in a unique way. We are here to show that even though Catholics are not perfect, we can still have God play a part in our lives.

The website features weekly audio and video podcasts, news from the world of sports and entertainment, and practical advice for teens–all from the perspective of Catholic teens themselves.

Students have been working in groups to produce content for the site–developing topics for articles, creating storyboards for videos, and writing scripts for podcasts. Together, they and I are learning what it takes to be a part of a multimedia web organization.  We’re all pretty new at this, but we have a lot of enthusiasm and passion.

The model and inspiration for our site is the fantastic work being done by Fr. Roderick Vonhögen and others at SQPN, the Star Quest Production Network.

We encourage you to visit Called2BSaints.com today and subscribe to our blog feed. You can also copy and paste our podcast feed in your iTunes software to listen on your iPod or other mp3 player. And if you like what you hear in our podcast, be sure to vote for Called2BSaints on Podcast Alley.

Please help us spread the word by mentioning us to teens, teachers, and parents; or perhaps you’d like to add Called2BSaints to your blogroll.  If you have a comment, question or suggestion, you can use the Contact Us page to send us your feedback. The more feedback the students get, the more motivated and excited they’ll be to keep improving their content.

Thanks in advance for your help in supporting our new endeavor.

• They’ve already indicated to me their area of interest: blogging, audio production or video production.  Fortunately, there are an equal number of students interested in each area.
• Right now they’re in the process of developing the mission statement of the site in order to have a clear focus when it comes time to create content.  They’ve looked at various mission statements from around the web, including the mission statement from SQPN, the model for our project.
• After they’ve developed the mission statement, the class will brainstorm domain names and we’ll go through the process of seeing what’s available.  We’ve already done some preliminary work on this, so it shouldn’t take too long.
• Once the domain name has been chosen, students will get into their groups to develop an editorial calendar.  The blogging group will decide on recurring content for each day of the week, and the other two groups will develop a production schedule for their weekly podcasts.
• As they begin working on content, they’ll also have input on the appearance of the site and we’ll begin to make some decisions about what it should look like.  We’ll use freely available blog themes to begin with, as we don’t have money to pay a designer, and none of us are experienced enough with template design to make our own.
• Our target goal for publishing our first content is October 12, but our public launch will be November 1, All Saints Day, since our school is All Saints Catholic School.  We hope to have several weeks’ worth of content before that time.
• In the days leading up to November 1, students will learn how to market their site to the Internet community, as well as to their own school community.

This is the first time I’ve ever done anything like this, and I’m a bit nervous about how it will go, but I’ve got great faith in the students.  My job will be to function as the editor-in-chief– approving stories, suggesting rewrites and edits, helping them learn the audio and video software, and so on.

You can be sure that the readers of Teen Literacy Tips will be a part of our public launch, so keep checking back for stories of our progress.  Better yet, why not subscribe to Teen Literacy Tips.  You can get every article via email, or you can have the content delivered to your blog reader.

Click here for the RSS feed for Teen Literacy Tips.  See the right-hand column to subscribe via email.

Materials Needed:

• Windows Movie Maker software (available with Windows XP or as a free download)
• Librivox.org (for public domain recordings of poetry)
• Wikimedia Commons (for public domain images)

Procedure:

1. Students find a poem they like on Librivox.org and download the mp3 to their computer. (Or, alternatively, they can record their own version of the poem and save it as an mp3.)
2. Using Windows Movie Maker, students import the poetry sound file.
3. They then search for images on Wikimedia Commons and import them into Windows Movie Maker using transitions and titles to make the movie more interesting.

Remember to review copyright law and public domain with students.

Make one yourself to see how it’s done, and post a link to it in the comments section. Here’s one I made a while back: