Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Malvern prep sixthgraders visit Ellis Island
Students gain personal insight about the role of immigration in the history of the United States.
MALVERN » Recently Malvern Prep School’s 6th grade class traveled to Ellis Island to gain a deeper insight on the historical role immigration has had within the United States.
The 42 students, along with faculty members, first made a stop in New Jersey’s Liberty State Park and then took ferry rides to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.
The field trip was part of the school’s new Sixth Grade Academy, a program which focuses on student centered, project based learning. Malvern Prep plans on implementing this learning program during the middle school years and beyond.
Earlier this year, teachers created the new program and aimed to match topics within the students’ curriculum including history, science, math, science, theology and language arts.
Immigration was one such topic the faculty thought of as significant and worth further exploring with the class. The trip to Ellis Island enabled the students to see firsthand a historical landmark in relation to immigration in the country.
“We felt that we could create a significant experience for the boys under the umbrella of im-
“We saw Ellis Island as a true piece of American history that could give the boys some perspective.” — James Wasson, English teacher at Malvern Prep School
migration. Ellis Island was a great opportunity for us to show the boys the rich history of immigration our country,” said James Wasson, an English teacher at the school.
“One of the big things we have emphasized in the study of immigration has been what are the push and pull factors of immigration? Our guiding question has been, why do people immigrate?
We saw Ellis Island as a true piece of American history that could give the boys some perspective.”
The idea to further teach students about immigration was inspired by a 2012 graduate of Malvern Prep named Adams Daramy, a native of Sierra Leone. Born during his country’s civil war, he fled the dangers of his home- land at age 6, and immigrated to the United States on a diversity visa. In September, Daramy returned to Malvern Prep to share his own story of immigration with the sixth grade class.
“As we were planning our unit, we felt it would be powerful for Adams to come back to Malvern and speak to our sixth grade class to launch our immigration project,” said Wasson. “That launched the project that we have been working on since September. The backbone of our project rests on the acquisition of roughly 15 immigrants that have agreed to be interviewed by groups of our boys. Basically what we are doing is having the boys reach out to the immigrants we have acquired, invite them on campus to be interviewed, so that the boys can record their stories. Our ultimate goal is to use an Amazon publishing platform called Create Space to publish a book of the immigrants’ stories. “
In addition to sight-seeing around Ellis Island, the boys were given a project to work on for the day, which would be the basis of a presentation project when returning to the classroom. They were given a fictitious profile of an immigrant who may have come through Ellis Island.
Said Wasson, “It was their job to experience the museum and discover the push and pull factors of immigrants from various regions of the world that might have come through Ellis Island. It really was a great trip for our boys. When they came home, they spent the remainder of the week, crafting their historical fictional narratives of their immigrants. We then invited parents, administrators and faculty to come and see the presentations our boys made on the fictional immigrants they had created.”