Kids Who Care
Spotlight on:
Hubbard Middle School
Plainfield, NJ
Grades 6-8
Hubbard Middle School students care about:
Eradicating cancer and racial injustice
Students at Hubbard Middle School in Plainfield have a finely tuned sense of social and racial injustice. Two years ago the students created a remarkable Darfur Gallery Walk as a PACES project. It informed the school and the larger community about the genocide in Darfur by tracing the development of the crisis through a series of student presentations that lined the main halls of the school. Once again, the target audience (Hubbard student body, elementary school students, citizens of Plainfield) were treated to two separate gallery walks, each painstakingly constructed by Hubbard students.
Class study and discussion served as the catalyst for Hubbard’s informative gallery walks. When the topic of breast cancer arose in health class, students went into action, Making Strides Against Breast Cancer, creating boards of information and PowerPoints that delineated symptoms, prevention, incidence, treatment, and statistics. In conjunction with the American Cancer Society, the students also engaged in fund raising for the cure. Lastly, in this interdisciplinary project that utilized the contributions of many disciplines, many students created their own personal messages, often poignantly describing their pain when a loved one was afflicted with breast cancer; others interviewed individuals who had survived while still others composed poems about the disease and painful loss. It was clear that the gallery walk had a powerful effect on the target audience; many a mother who had put off getting her mammogram vowed to get one soon. The participants also became activists in another way and signed up for the race for the cure.
Equally moving was the gallery walk on the Middle Passage which chronicled the forcible passage of the African people from Africa to the New World, during the middle leg of the trans-Atlantic trade triangle in which millions]of Africans were imprisoned and enslaved. An outgrowth of discussion in social studies class, this 
students who constructed the gallery walk and those who observed it expressed admiration for their forbearers and what they had endured. Perhaps the most moving reflections were those created by students who walked in the shoes of their ancestors and created heartrending journals of the ordeal. Local press covered the events and the presence of town officials added significance to the projects. Get lesson plans:
- Making Strides Against Breast Cancer
Core Ethical Values addressed: Responsibility, empathy, civic-mindedness
Curriculum Connections: Visual Arts; Health Ed.; Social Studies; Language Arts - The Middle Passage Gallery Walk
Core Ethical Values addressed: Caring, empathy, civic-mindedness
Curriculum Connections: Visual Arts; Health Ed.; Social Studies; Language Arts; World Languages