Reflection: For this exploration, I wanted to combine my love of art, with my curiosity about other places around the world. When I first learned about Sister Cities, I was fascinated. I spent a good amount of time looking through all the cities I had lived in or frequently traveled, and tried to see if I knew anything about the seemingly random foreign sister cities across the globe. I wondered if any of those pairings had citizens participate in a penpal program. I recalled how much I had enjoyed when my elementary school assigned us penpals. I also know of fun art projects that adult artists have done, where they send art postcards to other artist strangers across the world. I think that art and music are extremely useful when learning and communicating about different cultures. I used all of these experiences and concepts as a jumping off point for my main idea. 

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Even though this Exploration would just be an exercise for students to do a small bit of research and simple graphic design planning— I think that this would be an excellent idea to actually have students paired with a sister city mailing address for students of the same age range! I would limit the postcards to just illustrations, so there wouldn’t be a need to translate, (unless students wanted the foreign language practice as well.) Capital cities and cities with the largest populations usually get the most media and textbook coverage, but many of the sister cities are smaller, and deserve attention too!

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I want students to think about the similarities between their town, and one that’s located in Guatemala, or Turkey, or Lithuania. Using the lens of one’s own personal experience can make new information easier to care about, and retain once they’ve learned it. Then, students can think about what is unique about their own town, and what they would share with another culture. What about the sister city’s culture would they like to know? 

This is a project idea that brought me a lot of joy, and I would love to try this out with my own students in the future.