A Postcard from Chadwick and The Athenian School: A Dive Into Californian Culture

Posted: 01 March 2021

Overview

Chadwick School and The Athenian School jointly hosted a one hour Round Square Postcard with the theme ‘Dive into California’s Culture’. Over twenty schools took part in addition to our hosts, connecting more than 140 students from the USA, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, India, Oman, South Africa, and the UK. On the call we were introduced to different aspects of Californian culture before students split into breakouts groups for discussion and then participated in an online teams quiz.

Planning

Four students from each  host school were on the planning group along with Becca Marcus and Mark Friedman, the Round Square coordinators at Chadwick and Athenian.

The group met once a week for an hour starting about five weeks before the event. Some planning was done in the whole group and then there were sub-groups to plan the presentation about California at the start of the meeting and another to plan an interactive quiz at the end.

The students found that the collaboration between Chadwick and Athenian made everything richer and more fun but also made it essential to negotiate meeting times that worked for the two school’s different schedules. The schools are in the same time zone so it was slightly easier.

Details

Welcome and Introductions (5 minutes)

• One person introduced the event then introduced themself
• Each member of the 8 person student committee then introduced themselves (age, grade, name, school, location)
• Someone introduced the presentation and it began it from there.

Presentation: (15 minutes)

• Intro: pretty much welcome to the presentation
• Athenian presentation: 30 second fact sharing about Athenian
• Chadwick: 30 second fact sharing about Chadwick
• Stereotypes: Student leaders shared stereotypes about California and used a word cloud to share these. Words said many times were bigger in size so it was easier to identify big stereotypes and address them.
• History of California
• Indigenous people in California
• Mexico and California
• The gold rush history
• Formation of the State of California
• History of the movie industry history and now in 21st in hollywood
• Surf Culture
• Southern California Sports
• Other California Culture

What are you saying? Talking about California Slang

• Reflection
• Presentation was in the form of a google doc: it was an easy platform because everyone could edit and add whatever they wanted.
• Each leader knew exactly what they should say so the presentation went smooth
• Organisers believe that including California slang was a popular way to further involve the audience in the culture of California especially within Cali teen culture.

Discussion in breakout room with sharing to whole group at the end (20 minutes)

• Organizers asked two questions for the people in breakout rooms to discuss:
• 1) how your school is similar/different from the California schools
• 2) what stereotypes do people have about people from where you live and how has that affected you.
• Discussions were brought back to the large audience and specific people shared what they talked about within their group.

Quiz in breakout rooms (20 minutes)

• Organisers offered a ten question quiz in a google forms format.
• The questions were about all things California, from geography to random trivia to business.
• Organizers chose to have one person play the game and screen share so that everyone could see the questions and brainstorm with each other.
• The game was a very successful way to get people collaborating!

Closing statements (5 mins)

• Organisers thanked participants for their attendance.

Organizers had an extra activity up their sleeves just in case they had extra time. 2 students, 1 from Athenian and 1 from Chadwick were ready to participate in a q and a if time permitted. It didn’t.

Challenges

Student leaders felt that the problems encountered could be boiled down into two core issues: communication and technology. They anticipated tech issues so double checked everything beforehand. Making sure that everyone was muted was a bit of a challenge. Organizers found that it was essential that student leaders had a way to contact each other. They felt that things ran pretty smoothly. They felt that their ad-libbing abilities played a large part in keeping people talking and engaged.

Another challenge faced was making sure that the game was based on the presentation and trying to make the facts interesting and relatable. In the beginning the game had a lot of questions that were hard to answer if you knew nothing about California, so students changed the game to more of a trivia on the presentation. In the end organisers felt that the game was fun and engaging.

Other challenges included finding a time when everyone in the planning group was free and the logistics of getting students together from two schools and finding a meeting time that works for both schools was hard.

Impact 

Through this experience students felt that they got to meet people from different countries. They also learned themselves that other parts of California are a lot different to LA. One student organizer reported that 10-15 people reached out to him after the event to thank him and started following him on social media generating a feeling of satisfaction from the event going well. Students enjoyed working with another school and getting their perspective.

Long Term Outcomes

• Feeling of satisfaction.
• Information for others about California.
• Recognition for Athenian and Chadwick.
• Leaders felt that their ability to present in front of others was enhanced through the practice they put in.
• The students felt they had worked hard and planned carefully and then were able to see the fruits of their labour.
• Having successfully run this successful online event, student leaders felt the had developed the confidence to take on a similar task another time.

Advice

Student organisers commented…..

• Do it! It’s a great way to meet people. It’s easy to get people to talk about themselves. It’s such a simple thing and so many people end up appreciating it. The time commitment required to plan was easy to manage. It’s informative, it’s fun and you get to meet different kinds of people. 
• Have a way to communicate with the leaders during the event, such as a Whats App group that people can access via their phones.
• Student organisers recommend that presenters don’t use the Zoom chat function because it is very overwhelming and not very helpful.
• Organisers found that Word clouds are a great way to involve the audience yet not have it be too intense.

Author: Student Committee at The Athenian School and Chadwick School