Call to family, community and participation

For our unit on call to family, community, and participation (a theme of Catholic social teaching) we had our students interview some teachers in the building about their families. We did this as a sort of time-filler (which I’ll explain in a moment), but it was actually a pretty powerful exercise for the students. I think as students, especially in grade school and high school, we don’t usually recognize our teachers as actual people. We sort of assume that they live in the school and spend all their time with the other teachers talking about education things. We usually don’t question what their personal or social lives look like, and we certainly don’t wonder about their backgrounds and histories. This exercise made our students inquire about specifically those topics. It was great to see their responses. They all seemed to have a good time interviewing their teachers and liked reporting back to everyone the interesting information they discovered. I think also, on some level, this experience puts them on more equal footing with the teachers. They feel more like adults because they are respected and valued enough to be trusted with this sensitive information. 

As a side note, someone PLEASE write something about the theological values of family. We had such a hard time with this lesson because there was NOTHING out there on the theological value of family. There was a ton of stuff on marriage, even a little bit on parenting, but not an ounce on children’s role in a family. How can we discuss the call to family, when the Church doesn’t really take the time to talk about it? Any ideas on ways to engage high school students in the idea of the family?