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Silk Road Connect pilot program teachers dyeing with indigo at a workshop in September 2009
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© JENNY BALFOUR-PAUL
| Silk Road Connect
Silk Road Connect is a multi-year, multidisciplinary educational initiative targeting middle school students in underserved communities. The program presents four integrated themes designed to help students and teachers discover connections in and out of the classroom, creating opportunities to experience learning driven by passion rather than learning simply to meet requirements.
Music, Art and Performance
Throughout the Silk Road Connect program, students engage with professional musicians, artists and performers who act as models of excellence, addressing multiple learning strengths as students work toward a culminating performance with Yo-Yo Ma and members of the Silk Road Ensemble.
A regular series of school visits by teaching artists—musicians, visual artists and dancers—lead up to an opportunity for students and teachers to perform with members the Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma, showcasing what they have learned and created during the year.
Origins
Examining origins helps students make their learning meaningful in a personal context and develop empathy and openness to unexpected connections. Students engage with the question, “Who am I, and what is my place in the world?”
National Geographic's Genographic Project will work with students and teachers to reveal, through limited DNA analysis, how individuals are linked to one another through more than 60,000 years of human migration.
The Silk Road
Study of the Silk Road trading route provides a guiding metaphor of exchange across cultures and disciplines while integrating with the Social Studies curriculum.
The Silk Road Project offers the Along the Silk Road curriculum, created in partnership with the Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE), which explores the vast ancient network of cultural, economic and technological exchange that connected East Asia to the Mediterranean. Also available is the “Music Travels the Silk Road” issue of CALLIOPE magazine for students, rich with information about musical migrations along the Silk Road and featuring Silk Road Ensemble instruments and musicians.
Indigo
Finally, students and teachers encounter new perspectives through tales told by things; in the pilot program model of connected study, the dye indigo offers links among scientific, historical, and artistic modes of inquiry and serves as the foundation for students to share their year of learning in the final performance.
As one of many possible tales told by things, indigo presents endless possibilities for learning across various disciplines: hands-on dyeing of fabric, growing an indigo plant, examining the history of the indigo trade and its effect on many cultures, studying the dye’s unique chemical properties, and discovering the hidden story of our own ubiquitous blue jeans.
To support this work, professional development sessions engage teachers as active learners, allow planning for program implementation in school teams, and offer opportunities to connect with educators from other pilot program schools. Teachers have access to a private online learning network, where they can share successes, ask questions and recommend resources.
The Silk Road Project's educational principles guide Silk Road Connect. In a spirit of playfulness and investigation, collaboration and creativity, Silk Road Connect invites students and teachers to experience learning as a continual process and the foundation for a meaningful life in our complex and interrelated world.
Silk Road Connect Partnerships
By invitation from the New York City Department of Education, the Silk Road Project is piloting Silk Road Connect in five public schools in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens. The pilot program involves approximately 450 sixth-grade students.
Pilot Program Partners with the Silk Road Project
The American Museum of Natural History
CALLIOPE Magazine
The Harvard Graduate School of Education
Jenny Balfour-Paul, indigo expert
Manhattan School of Music
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
National Geographic’s Genographic Project
New York City Department of Education
The Silk Road Ensemble
The Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE)
Teachers College at Columbia University
The Yarn Tree
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