StoryWorks Theater’s Teaching the Constitution Through Theater develops inclusive and transformative educational theater experiences that provides students with the opportunity to examine our history and to foster a deeper understanding of the U.S. Constitution. Through content consistent with school curriculum standards, the program engages students in experiential learning and inspires them to ask complex questions about the historical underpinnings behind contemporary issues. The process creates pathways to civic engagement, creates lasting memories and instills a tangible sense of social belonging. Now’s The Time opens at the dawn of Reconstruction, the Civil War has just ended but the nation is plunged again into crisis with the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Andrew Johnson ascends to the Presidency determined to restore white supremacy in the South. Congressional radicals led by Thaddeus Stevens are fighting for a different vision. They intend to create a new society of full racial equality, where Black Americans will have real economic and political power, including ownership of land confiscated from the rebels, education, suffrage and election to public office. This titanic political battle between President and Congress culminates in the first impeachment and trial of a U.S. president, and to more than 150 years of continuing violence and discrimination against Black Americans.View the complete play Now’s The Time on the StoryWorks Theater site. Implementation1. Now’s The Time Performance Classroom watches a prerecorded, staged reading of the play Now’s The Time, written by Jean P. Bordewich and Produced by StoryWorks Theater.2. Lesson Plan Activities Following the six lesson plan structure, students will read aloud or act out scenes from the play. This participatory interaction with the text and the historical events promotes a high level of engagement from the students and encourages experiential learning. These activities directly correspond to scenes in the play and to specific content area standards. Throughout the curriculum, teachers will lead guided discussions and help to explain the historical context and theme of each scene. Students/actors will have the ability to share their experiences having portrayed these historical figures. Students/historians will have the unique opportunity to work with primary source materials to further their understanding of the complexities of the era and to gain insight into the critical legislative debates of the time.

The course is an introduction to Dante and his cultural milieu through a critical reading of the Divine Comedy and selected minor works (Vita nuova, Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia, Epistle to Cangrande). An analysis of Dante's autobiography, the Vita nuova, establishes the poetic and political circumstances of the Comedy's composition. Readings of Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise seek to situate Dante's work within the intellectual and social context of the late Middle Ages, with special attention paid to political, philosophical and theological concerns. Topics in the Divine Comedy explored over the course of the semester include the relationship between ethics and aesthetics; love and knowledge; and exile and history.

This Lesson was created to use in conjunction with materials in Clusive [https://clusive.cast.org], a free, online learning environment that makes materials flexible and accessible.  The Lesson is designed to engage and support middle school teachers and their students to evaluate Tom Sawyer as one of a long-line of trickster characters in world literature. 

We may be leaving out information or disregarding it because it doesn't conform with our own beliefs.  Students will learn about confirmation bias, different perspectives and how to avoid confirmation bias.  This lesson is part of a media unit curated at our Digital Citizenship website, "Who Am I Online?". 

Product-based authentic assessment provides a valuable alternative to traditional forms of assessment by emphasizing practical application, creativity, problem-solving, collaboration, and communication skills. It allows students to demonstrate their abilities in meaningful ways, prepares them for real-world challenges, and provides a richer and more comprehensive assessment of their learning outcomes.

In this lesson, djembefola Weedie Braimah will introduce students to the cultural traditions of drumming in Congo Square. Students will collaboratively plan and design a community “Square” that represents a collective cultural space.

- Discuss the western African music traditions of Congo Square in New Orleans.
- Describe the essence and purpose of Congo Square.
- Examine personal, social, and cultural identities.
- Identify personal, social, and cultural traditions.
- Design a common cultural community space for expressing music, history, and culture.
- Present cultural community space concepts to an audience.

Preservation Hall Lessons is designed for all K-12 teachers or educational professionals that want to foster the culture and history of New Orleans music genres. The lessons can be integrated into general content areas like Language Arts, Math, Social Studies, and Science, or beginning to advanced Music Education studies.

This curriculum serves to assist middle schoolers develop and explore “femaleness” as a fluid construct of identity. Using literature and nonfiction text, students will be asked to critically analyze female characters, their roles and choices as presented. In New Haven, the current core text being used is The House on Mango Street (THOMS) by Sandra Cisneros, and while this curriculum uses THOMS as a “foundational” text, other texts could serve as viable options. The text serves as a launchpad for whole class and small group discussions. Having a common or a foundational text not only provides students with a shared literary experience from which they can develop a common language, but it also allows students to create a barrier of safety--a level of personal distancing. This personal distancing shifts classroom discussions away from individual experiences that may subject students to judgments that sometimes accompany discussions related to topics of gender and sexuality. Negative judgments would have a deleterious and stifling effect on not only classroom discussions but run contrary to what the curriculum hopes to achieve--a nonjudgmental exploration of women and their roles in the world.

Students will gain voice and language through exploration of the fluidity of the construct of femaleness. The curriculum attempts to expand initial literature inquiries into the female construct by providing students further opportunities to explore, discuss, synthesize and refine ideas using nonfiction texts concerning women, their roles and world placement using various sociological, economic and political lenses. Exposing students to a diversity of voices of and about women through both the dramatic narrative, essays and other multimedia concerning the economics, sociological and political aspects of womanhood should serve as a contextual backdrop which for some students may be a first inquiry into unquestioned acceptance of what it means to be female. The curriculum seeks to compel students to think critically about what it means to be female, look beyond traditional binary frameworks of male versus female, single versus married ideologies and seeks to have them reevaluate what may be familiar female images. It asks students to examine and question the possibility of limitations of their constructs of “femaleness.”

Using reflective writing, small and large group discussions, students will develop voice, and identity, appreciate the multi-dimensions and perspectives contained within the construct of the female and its intersections of sex, class and race. The curriculum forces students not only to gather information about women from fictional narratives and historical sociological, economic and psychological essays but it asks them expend synergistic energy to evaluate various expressions to develop agency, to not be victims and determine their role in the depicting what it means to be “female.”

Summary
We have designed an interdisciplinary unit for eighth-grade students that will take approximately three weeks to complete. Over the course of this unit, students will examine the impact of Spanish imperialism on three Latin American nations (Mexico, Guatemala, and Chile) through studies of the history and cultures of those nations. This unit will combine elements of several different academic subjects (including Social Studies, English, Art, and Foreign Language) as students learn about not just the factual history of these countries, but also important aspects of the human experience within each nation. Alongside lessons on the legacy of Spanish colonialism in Latin America, students will interact with literature, artwork, and firsthand accounts of people from each country, allowing students to analyze the impact of history on culture and broaden their global awareness. It is our hope that this unit will also expand students’ consciousness by teaching them about the injustices that resulted from colonization as well as multiple perspectives of those involved.
As a summative assessment for this unit, students will choose one of the three Latin American nations they studied and design a creative project (either independently or collaboratively) that will showcase their learning about a significant aspect of that country’s history or culture. Students will have a list of options to choose from, all of which require them to use their creative talents to synthesize their learning and communicate it effectively through their chosen medium. These options include (but are not limited to) writing a fictional travel journal that incorporates the religion, politics, or culture of the region, designing a newspaper page set during the time of an important historical event, and writing and filming an imaginary interview with a significant cultural figure.

Students will examine ways declining bee population can impact day to day life, by considering how the cost of honey and pollination has been affected society Students will create real-world problems that relate to statistics on the declining bee population.

This course outline is designed for a Level 7 advanced communication course at Portland Community College. It addresses listening, speaking, pronunciation, and presentation skills within the theme of entrepreneurship by drawing inspiration from the TV show “Shark Tank” and its various incarnations in other languages/countries around the world.

The curriculum is designed for a term of 8 weeks. Each class period is 3 hours long, and the class meets twice weekly for a total of 16 class periods plus final exam. During the course, students complete several projects:

*a survey of people outside of class
*a report to the class about the survey results
*a video commercial for a new product
*a live pitch for a new product to a panel of guest “sharks”

The course outline links to all supporting materials in the form of Google Docs, Google Forms, Google Slides, Quizlets, YouTube videos, etc.

The subject of this course is the historical process by which the meaning of "technology" has been constructed. Although the word itself is traceable to the ancient Greek root teckhne (meaning art), it did not enter the English language until the 17th century, and did not acquire its current meaning until after World War I. The aim of the course, then, is to explore various sectors of industrializing 19th and 20th century Western society and culture with a view to explaining and assessing the emergence of technology as a pivotal word (and concept) in contemporary (especially Anglo-American) thought and expression.
Note: In the interests of freshness and topicality we regard the STS.464 syllabus as sufficiently flexible to permit some — mostly minor — variations from year to year. One example of a different STS.464 syllabus can be found in STS.464 Technology and the Literary Imagination, Spring 2008.

Short Description:
The book examines the work of Terence Grieder, an early pre-Columbian art historian of wide-ranging interests and often provocative stances. His students and other intellectual descendants discuss his major ideas through examples drawn from their own work. The work of those he mentored is in the end the most important testament to his continuing influence in the field.

Word Count: 77114

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)

In this engaging unit, students will design and plant a square-foot garden that will be their central tool. Through the growing season, they will explore nutrition content in their everyday lives and see how it relates to what they are growing.

Get ready to plan a trip to a Spanish-speaking country, but which one?  There are over twenty Spanish-speaking countries around the world. In this seminar you will learn about these countries and as you find out where they are geographically, consider what country would you want to visit and why.ACTFL StandardsCommunication: Interpretive Communication and Presentational CommunicationConnections: Making ConnectionsCommunities: School and Global CommunitiesLearning TargetI can name countries on a map and provide directions.Habits of MindStriving for accuracyCritical Thinking SkillAnalyzing Perspectives 

This course is designed to give you a broad overview of the field of literary studies.  We will read texts from different time periods, different parts of the world, and different genres.  We will learn the tools to put in our toolbox to help us analyze literature like a professional.

The aim of this three week long exploratory unit is for students to stop focusing on the digital world that they know so well and begin to focus on themselves and their own feelings. This unit focuses on the power of choice and ownership for young children in what is typically a very structured school day. They will learn how to express themselves through different styles of poetry. These different poems will be explored online and then discussed. My students will then get the opportunity to create poems themselves. They will be given the option to work concretely or digitally on their poems; even given the option to make a hard copy and a digital copy of the same poem. Finally, at the end of the unit the students will be able to present their work as a reflection of their authentic selves and not a “persona” they are trying to create. They will share this work to a specific audience rather than posting for anyone to see to reiterate the importance of privacy and safety in a digital world.

Short Description:
Within these pages, Constance Hodder's poems explore the inner self in context to the physical world.

Long Description:
Within these pages, Constance Hodder finds her voice in poems written that explore inner self often in context of the the physical world. Living out in rural Minnesota surrounded by nature, she weaves this imagery into the fabric of her poetry. Sometimes her poems revisit the past to look closely at life’s strengths as well as it’s fragility; sometimes they take a humorous or fanciful look into her present time in life. In all her poems, she takes the reader into her world of where life remains precious though sometimes difficult.

Word Count: 9381

ISBN: 979-8-9881824-0-5

(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)

How do I motivate my students to create their own original art work? How to I get my students to start thinking creatively? I have used I See, Wonder and Think activity combined with three ways to think about art as a spring board for motivating students. Imitationalism: This is a belief that art work should be made to represent what we see in the real world. Sometimes it is also referred to as Realism.Formalism: This is the belief that art work should focus on the Language of Art. The artist focus is on using the Elements of Art and the Principles of design as the main focus of the art work. Sometimes referred to as the form, or formal aspects of the work.Emotionalism: This is the belief that art work should express the artist emotion or create an emotional reaction or response from the viewer. This is some times referred to as expressionistic.

SYNOPSIS: In this lesson, students learn about deforestation and climate change and respond by writing an ode or an elegy.

SCIENTIST NOTES: This lesson empowers students to understand what deforestation entails and how they can write poems to express their feelings of grief, respect, emotion, and valor in combating deforestation in their community. All materials used in the lesson have been verified and are suitable for teaching. In this light, this lesson is credible and recommended for the classroom.

POSITIVES:
-This lesson can be used as a standalone or as a lesson in a poetry unit.
-Students are given voice and choice.
-Students create their own poetic response to a real-world challenge.

ADDITIONAL PREREQUISITES:
-Students should have some basic understanding of poetry.
-Students should have a basic understanding of deforestation and its connection to climate change.

DIFFERENTIATION:
-This lesson is easily adaptable to Advanced Placement or honors level classes by including other literary and language elements in the poems such as juxtaposition, oxymoron, consonance, assonance, enjambment, alliteration, and personification.
-Students can write each stanza in a different meter or rhyme. Examples include iambic pentameter or ABBA rhyme scheme.
-Teachers can split the lesson in two and focus on an ode in the first lesson and an elegy in the second.
-Students can write both an ode and an elegy and compare the differences in writing, tone, and overall effect.
-Social studies, civics, and economics classes can extend this topic to social justice, socioeconomic class, and cultural impacts of deforestation within each specific region.
-Student poems can be shared outside of the classroom in the school newspaper or a community newsletter, on a class or teacher website, on school display boards, or in extracurricular poetry or environmental clubs.