Kay Treiber , fifth-grade teacher at UNI's Price Laboratory School, says these seven values are important to developing a sense of community and of responsibility for continuing a democracy. She has incorporated them into her teaching and made them an integral part of her curriculum. She says an example of a community builder was a birthday line where the 23 students had to get themselves into a chronological line of their birthdays, figuring out how to communicate without talking. She says the students' own understanding of most of the values has increased, but others have been difficult to explain. Equality means that everything is equal and justice isn't always equal.
Justice is fairness.
Treiber says once the students understand the core values, they move on to the concept that in order to enhance the community, students need to be part of that community. She adds that this is what democratic citizenship is all about. Students have carried this respect for others over to their hallway behavior and other areas of deportment, Treiber says. There's hardly any noise when we go from place to place in the hallway because they know they would be interfering with someone else's learning, and their individual rights cannot come ahead of the common good of the school. The values are becoming part of their being.