The documentary film Paper Clips provided an amazing example of the power of a collaborative teaching unit. The teachers' dedication to their teaching topic and the 'paper clip' project inspired their students to work with the same dedication toward their goal of collection six million paper clips. I appreciated that the students were actively involved in creating the idea for the project and spent extensive amounts of time reaching out to those in their community and the world beyond.
I felt that the unit had a strong lesson of teaching Whitwell students the dangers of intolerance and what can happen when intolerance and prejudice is left unchecked. However, I felt as though the unit focused mainly on the study of intolerance in the past and did little to directly apply those concepts to the present and future. Did students learn how to actively combat racial intolerance in the United States and their own community? What about genocides that are currently occurring around the globe? From what the documentary displayed, the paper clips project instilled strong ideas about the dangers of prejudice, but did little to directly address presently relevant problems within our own country and around the world in relation to religious, racial, or ethnic intolerance and genocide.
