As Diane and I met over dinner to discuss our collaboration unit we both began to get very excited about the project. Our unit will be taught from March 23rd to April 1st. While we have built the unit around Elie Wiesel's Night, the unit will encompass more than a broad overiew of the holocaust. My responsibilities as the librarian will be to gather resources, generate assesment tools, assist in planning, facilitate discussion, and compile evaluation data. Diane will be responsible for teaching the unit, planning the unit, facilitating discussion, and evaluation.
As we were determining the responsibilities each of us would have, Diane expressed some concerns about discussion. Sometimes it is difficult to get students to share freely in the classroom. Even as the teacher, it is sometimes hard to share thoughts on a topic such as the holocaust. That is why we decided that both of us would participate in the facilitation of discussion. We are considering using a blog for students to share questions and thoughts outside of class so that we can anticipate how to drive the in class discussions.
The assessment tools I am building will include a pre-teach and post-teach checklist. This will include topics such as knowledge about the holocaust, knowledge about different forms of oppression worldwide, evaluation of information, use of technology, and creative writing skils. For evaluating specific tasks I will create rubrics that students will use as a guide throughout the unit activities.
The unit activities are varied. In order to engage students in this historical topic, we have decided to group students together and give them images of oppression worldwide. This will be part of our pre-teach lesson. The students will generate questions about the images given and will share them with their classmates. Then we will introduce them to the book. Most classroom time will be used to read and discuss Night. The main homework assignment will be for the students to create a short story based on research of the images given on the first day.
One of the main challenges we will face as we pursue this unit is establishing the classroom as a safe place to discuss issues of race and oppression. The school we are teaching at has a student demographic that is 49% African American and 49% Caucasian with a 2% minority. One way to create a safe environment is to determine ground rules as a class before we begin the unit. We are also hoping that the structure of our unit will open our students' eyes beyond their immediate environment to the issue of oppression throughout the world.
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Carrie and Diana,
ReplyDeleteWhat are the essential questions you are asking(or the big ideas)in the unit? For example, since you are dealing with oppression and racial/ethnic discrimination, you might ask: What is hate and what is the underlying reason people hate and discriminate against one another throughout history? What are the philosophical and moral alternatives to hate and discrimination (e.g. Ghandi's idea of the "beloved community".
I am curious of how the first session went and how the students responded to the introduction of the issue of global oppression. What were there reactions? What kinds of questions did they ask during the class discussions?
With a virtually split racial/ethnic school composition, can you speak to how that impacts your instructional design in your next blog entry. In other words, do you deliberately try to elicit perspectives about the holocaust from different cultural vantage points on oppression in your activities? Also, given the racial demographic, have you considered allowing students to explore the history of Black/Jewish alliances in the civil rights era and how that has evolved over the years. They might find that interesting. What do you mean by 2% minority?
Since I have some very detailed questions and since you and Diane have already indicated that you are implementing the lesson this week, I'd like to discuss some of my questions via this blog comment feature.
Prof. K
Essential questions that we are asking are:
ReplyDeleteWhat were the causes of the holocaust?
What are the underlying reasons for other forms of oppression we have seen and are seeing throughout history? Why does this history of ethnic cleansing keep repeating, ie. given the outcomes of WWII, why are we still seeing ethnic cleansing in the Sudan, Rwanda, etc.? How do we evaluate nonfiction writing?
From my conversations with Diane, the students were very interested in researching the different forms of oppression throughout the world. During the discussion period students were very willing to share their knowledge of different types of oppression and their opinions. Diane noted that some students were a little more passionate about their views and in some cases she could notice the more reserved students shy away from continuing the discussion.
We addressed the split racial/ethnic school composition in our instructional design by having the students develop ground rules for discussion. This included allowing the students to express openly what types of things they found offensive. Both races of students were comfortable in sharing their perceptions and correcting misconceptions.
We did not have time to incorporate the history of Black/Jewish alliances during the civil rights era, but it may be an area Diane can include in the future.
The 2% minority that I included was indicated that 2% of the student population is made up of other minority groups including students of asian and hispanic decent.