Primary source documents serve as the bedrock of all reliable social studies. They provide firsthand facts, descriptions, opinions, and accounts which illuminate the distant world of the past while allowing us to better understand the present. To many students, however, primary source documents are foreign, verbose, and tedious.

In order to reach out to these students, a history teacher’s best weapon is often adaptation, especially through the medium of film. Passionate actors, perceptive directors, witty screenwriters, and elaborate costumes bring dusty historical documents back to life through an immersive audiovisual experience.

Yet with a bit of inspection, these cinematic adaptations of history can reveal much more than secondary historical details. By analyzing these films as primary source documents themselves, audiences can gain insight into the time period in which the movies were made.

This curriculum unit considers the story of Spartacus—the celebrated hero of ancient history and the 1960 film directed by Stanley Kubrick—as both a primary and secondary source of history. How does Spartacus compare to the ancient sources recorded before the common era? And how does Spartacus reveal the political and social turmoil which afflicted the United States throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s?

In this unit I aim to help students see this connection, exploring the ways elite white Americans justified the enslavement of Africans and how some of these same ideas continue to perpetuate systemic racism in our country today. Ultimately, the goal of this unit is to have students gain a more holistic understanding of the connection between slavery and the growth of racism and white supremacy in the United States and the continued legacies today, so that students can investigate ways to become change agents to combat systemic racism. This unit is not intended to cover all of the important concepts regarding slavery, but be used as a supplemental resource to address this missing piece from many traditional textbooks/curriculums.

he cost of healthcare is one of the largest personal expenditures worldwide, with residents of the United States spending upwards of $10,000 each year. A significant portion of healthcare costs in the United States and many other countries comes from paying for prescription medications. This unit is designed to give 9-12th grade chemistry, pharmacology, or biology students an introduction to prescription drug costs and what scientific measures can be taken to lower costs. Topics necessary for this unit include the relationship between structure and function, pH, activation energy, the relationship between temperature and reaction rate, catalysts, inhibitors, among additional concepts. This unit functions as an end-of-year project incorporating all of the topics listed above and challenges students to conduct research, design their own strategy to lower drug costs, and prove their viability and cost-saving potential through calculation. Individually or in pairs students must pick a strategy or technology, spend a day or more researching it, two days writing a research paper on it, one day preparing a class presentation, and one day for presentations. Student’s ability to effectively prove the viability of their strategies/technologies as well as estimate the cost savings to consumers will be weighted heavily.

Global temperatures continue to be affected by the combustion of fossil fuels and the subsequent release of carbon dioxide. This 3-week unit is designed to give 9th grade physical science or environmental science student an introduction to climate change, how humans are influencing it, and what efforts we can make to help limit or prevent it. Topics necessary for this unit include electricity, circuits, greenhouse gases, alternative energies, embodied energy, payback period, and life cycle assessments. This unit functions as a culminating project incorporating all of the topics listed above and challenges students to conduct research, engineer their own alternative energy solutions and prove their efficiency through calculation. Individually or in pairs students must pick an alternative energy, spend a day or more researching it, a day drawing a blueprint for it and creating a materials list, two or three days building model “power plants” to light 3 LEDs, and two to three days writing summary research papers. The quantitative analysis of their models (included in their research papers) and student’s ability to prove their models environmental superiority over fossil fuels will be weighted heavily.

The subject matter in this unit will explore The American Disabilities Act, its impact on tourism, hospitality with empathetically designed applied biotechnological models. The primary objective of this unit is to get students to apply their foundational knowledge of allied health professions to a specified disability.

The curriculum unit was designed and formatted with the intention to give the student a basic understanding of disabilities and to design a rapid prototype with empathy.

Students will apply their scientific knowledge to the real-world and overarching question: “How do disabled people navigate activities of daily living and the world of travel with ease?” This curriculum unit will employ Design Thinking methodology towards the development of novel medical devices that can make daily life activities and traveling safer, convenient and more enjoyable.

The teaching strategies are varied, forward thinking, and promote brainstorming sessions as a means of student engagement. Strategies used will encourage students to think independently and work collaboratively. The curriculum unit framework includes a series of steps, including a complete understanding of the American Disabilities Act, an Everfi-Endeavor STEM careers exploration course that offers a tailored approach to introduce topics relating to Science, Technology, Engineering, Math and Medical Careers, and concludes with a service learning project.

This unit is intended for students studying digital media production in the 10-12th grade. The purpose of the unit is to help students to learn from some of the positive uses and negative uses of media. In this unit students will study the use of media to manipulate people: propaganda, followed by the power of media to call people to action, and the potential for calls-to-action based on social and or digital media to have both positive and unintended negative consequences. The students will study media bias and some potential consequences of it. The students will then reflect on which types of societal consequences for posting their digital media would be unacceptable to them. Armed with this knowledge, they will create personal standards that will empower them as unaffiliated journalists to steer clear of undesired outcomes.

This unit is a joint exploration of the genre of Japanese animation (“anime”) and Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey . The unit begins by questioning how stories work in general and what makes a narrative “epic” in particular. After establishing the foundations of narrative analysis and a set of concrete expectations for reading epic stories, the unit dives into the story of Odysseus, pairing it with similar anime narratives. Odysseus is a man who faces extraordinary obstacles, and this theme occurs in many anime series and movies, including Attack on Titan , Evangelion , Spirited Away , and many others. Students will study the content, looking at how the same kind of story is told in different ways with different implications, and they will also look at form: how Homer’s poetry and anime work in their own ways to achieve distinct aesthetic goals. Just as Homer’s poet shines with brilliance, there is also an enormous amount of creativity to bring to the drawn and moving image. By the end of this unit, students will have performed many exercises in close reading and analysis, culminating in their own experiment in the anime form and epic genre.

This curriculum unit seeks to broaden the repertoire and pedagogical techniques utilized in directing middle school orchestra. It aims to do this by rethinking dominant pedagogical approaches, and reexamining which narratives are presented in the classroom and for what purpose. If the curriculum is successful, it will firstly help the teacher include counter-narratives in instruction in a seamless manner and provide a framework for restructuring instruction moving forward. In that way, this is not really a curricular unit as much as a way to rethink what, how and why we teach a performance class like orchestra. By introducing counter-narratives, the teacher reaches and motivates a more diverse student body and opens doors to dialog with students about history in a way that would not be possible without the inclusion of counter-narratives. This curriculum also encourages a different approach for teaching basics like rhythm decoding using the South Indian syllabic system called solkattu. When we present culturally diverse solutions to teaching the basics of music performance, we expand our students’ awareness of the world and offer them different ways of solving a problem. The curriculum also presents ways to structure orchestral rehearsals in a more collaborative way which not only encourages trust and teamwork between students, but also gives them agency over the final performance of the material. As a culmination of the curriculum, the final unit includes five original arrangements for the middle school orchestra, including a score with all parts and files related to each arrangement. The five pieces include two Civil Rights era anthems, a spiritual from the Bahamas, a South African Zulu folksong, and a popular song of community/fellowship. The teaching of all these pieces will ultimately help to present counter-narratives, open dialog, and develop trust and a sense of personal investment while broadening the repertoire of the orchestra.

Students who are authentically engaged in reading ask questions about the text, make their own interpretations, and connect the stories they read to their own lives. Moving from written works to their film counterparts opens the original piece to different kinds of interpretations. My unit focuses on creating a space in which students read through different lenses, produce different meanings, outcomes, and understandings in order to strengthen critical thinking skills and to build an infinite capacity for meaning. By examining the underlying embedded themes and then seeing how those ideas are adapted into other media, students will be better positioned to make higher ordered inferences. What impact might a documentary, movie, or animated version have on the readers? What might students notice that they otherwise may have missed in the text version? What connections can students make between text and film versions? Adaptation, the transformation of text to film, is apropos to this unit tentatively titled Adapting Literature to Capture Authentic Understandings as it seeks to present strategies to help students use select literary devices in order to help them understand implied universal themes.

This unit introduces instructional moves for how teachers can use their classroom libraries for deep critical thinking on issues of race, racism, and inequality. This unit uses a middle school level novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (Taylor, 1976), but the content objectives, teaching strategies, and activities are applicable to any novel study. Building upon how classroom libraries function as resources for thought provoking literature and discussions from the 2019 Yale Teachers Institute Seminar Teaching about Race and Racism Across the Disciplines, this unit primarily explores the historical context of the novel primarily using the language of music to analyze characters. Students will develop interpretations about how these conditions influenced characters’ traits, roles, or conflicts and construct a central thesis on a character of their choice. It incorporates pedagogical tools and resources expanding curricular strategies and provides a framework for student discussion beyond the text on issues about race, racism, and forms of inequality.

My unit will align with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for Advanced Placement Literature students, although it could be adapted to other texts that pose the same question: Will we be cautious in creating technology, or will our creations ultimately harm us? Many dystopian futures feature violent revolts on humans from mistreated robots. These stories resonate because they mirror past brutality against African slaves, proposals to purify humanity in the Eugenics Movement, and recent mistreatment of immigrants. When we create more beautiful, more intelligent, and more talented humanoid entities to think for us, to entice us, and to comfort us, how will we view ourselves? Our virtual assistants have female voices. Does this amplify biased views of gender? If we treat our virtual assistants as slaves, will this increase our hatred towards other humans? Will our lives become completely irrelevant? In this unit, students will research the current state of robotics, and draw comparisons between our modern creations and the moral and technological warning in Frankenstein, encouraging students to think about the technology they use, feel agency in determining its future, and strive towards creating tools for a more humane world.

This unit is for a 12th grade International Issues Senior Seminar elective at a mid-sized public high school in New Haven, Connecticut. Most students in this class are enrolled in the Law & Politics Pathway where they took Contemporary Law in 10th grade and Constitutional Law in 11th grade. As a result of this course of study and their experience with student-centered, anti-racist and transformative pedagogy in these classes, they are ready for the continued embedding and examination of critical race theory in their learning. In addition, they expect continued engagement through discussion and performance-based assessment. As a result of the international focus, the focus on current events, and the multiple opportunities for student choice, students are motivated to participate, research, and discuss topics related to capitalism, patriarchy, racism & imperialism, climate crisis, and war. However, as a result of the intensity, trauma, and violence associated with these critical issues, it is crucial to also center and celebrate the resistance movements that consistently respond to toxic oppression and recreate lasting worlds of justice, healing, and peace. This unit focuses on dominant narratives and counternarratives to support students’ analysis of critical issues and subsequent envisioning of another possible world.

This prospective unit, entitled, Blacks in Nature…Oxymoron or Paradox? based on the seminar Social Struggles of Black Contemporary Art is intended to create a body of work to present students with an opportunity to gain language to discuss issues and concepts related to the “whiteness” in nature. It is an attempt to counter the “whiteness” of the environmental justice movement, by exposing students to a diversity of art, literature and nonfictional texts defining, documenting, examining, challenging, and elaborating the presence of nonwhites in nature text by illuminating its convergence with land and the Civil Rights’ movement. Students will be afforded an opportunity to examine the foundations and assumptions made of the various text as well as the basis of their own as it relates to the inclusion of nonwhites in and the study of nature and the environmental justice movement.

This curriculum uses reflective writing, visual creation, small and whole group discussions to explore the concept of nature and the environment as a human construct. Using art, literature and nonfiction texts, students will be asked to critically analyze ideas of nature, preservation of wilderness, and endangered species against the human concerns of hunger, toxic waste, culture, and urban planning in the context of environmental justice. Students will have an opportunity to critically analyze perceptions, foundations, and/or myths contained or on which the various text is constructed.

This unit prompts students in a twelfth-grade English class to question and challenge the roles and expectations that are placed upon them by society based on gender identity. By exposing the inconsistencies and contradictions inherent in a binary division of genders, our studies and discussions during this unit will push students to consider that gender identity and labeling need not determine an individual’s behavior, educational pursuits, or career path. Students will use a combination of contemporary and canon literature to reinforce the concepts that we will investigate. Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun will serve as anchor texts for students.

This unit will focus on the transgressive behavior of characters from some of Shakespeare’s most famous plays and how we can identify with those actions. This unit is designed to help students bridge the gap between Shakespearean literature and modern life. Many times we find ourselves saying the wrong thing to someone, something that might sound offensive; and even if we didn’t mean it, the next necessary step is to consider how we get out of that situation. In modern life, we create transgressive behavior just as did Shakespeare’s characters. The plays we will focus on in this unit are Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, and Henry IV part 1. Students will be asked to identify the transgressive behavior, to discuss the significance of who owns it, how he or she got into the situation, and how the scene might alternatively play out. Students will be asked to create parallel moments in contemporary contexts and to incorporate the Shakespeare line in their alternative contexts. This unit will suggest the use of vocabulary lists per each play, summaries of each story, character maps, as well as background information on the writer himself.

In this unit, students will explore a variety of reading material and other media in order to connect technology with issues of social justice. Over the course of three phases, students will consider how technology may be used to facilitate tangible change within communities. Students will first explore a range of science fiction texts and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of the advanced technology described in each. They will then focus on a variety of social justice issues in fiction, news articles, and poetry. In doing so, students will determine what issues are most important to them, and think about what steps they might take to raise awareness about these topics. The unit culminates in a project-based learning experience for students, in which they will collaborate and use various forms of digital technology to initiate tangible change, inspired by the readings and discussions from our class sessions. Overall, the unit asks students to consider what it means to be active and responsible citizens within a community, how literature can inspire real societal progress, and what role technology can play in accomplishing that goal.

This unit examines the AP Microeconomics curriculum and maps how topics taught throughout the year can be examined from an income inequality standpoint. More specifically, the unit defines income inequality and how it is measured, it examines ways of reducing inequality through taxation, tariffs, and wage floors. The primary classroom activities include blog posts and debates, which are included at the end of each of the major units. In each debate, students are expected to apply the microeconomic theory they’ve learned in class with additional research that ties the topic to the concept of income inequality. Essential questions have been included in the Strategies section that should be used while teaching specific topics to keep income inequality at the forefront of people’s minds.

This unit will teach students about “Carbon and Ecosystems.” They will begin by analyzing the four spheres: biosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, geosphere and how they are interconnected. They will understand that one system cannot exist without the other in order to maintain proper functioning within our planet. The students will learn about the various types of ecosystems that exist and how living organisms depend on other living and non-living organisms for survival. This being said, students will examine how the spheres interact and how changes in one, affects another. Students will understand that ecosystems are fueled by the energy from the sun and cycles from which they are powered.

It will focus on what the carbon cycle is and its’ influence in our lives. Carbon is essential for all life on Earth and is also in our atmosphere. It regulates the Earth’s temperature and provides an essential source of the energy to fuel our economy. The carbon cycle describes how carbon moves throughout the Earth’s spheres. By gaining a deeper understanding of how carbon moves, we can better regulate our daily decisions to help sustain our future.

I teach at a dual language school in New Haven formerly known as Christopher Columbus Family Academy. It is a school composed of almost all Hispanic students and designed on the exterior to resemble a ship. There is a large bust in front of the building of a navigator sighting land, an event commemorated on a nearby plaque celebrating the bravery and exploration of Columbus and his crew. The intended metaphor seems clear enough; the young students within the hull of this ship are also explorers of sorts. The school has since changed its controversial name, but the irony of the metaphor remains; students trapped within the hull of a vessel steered by imperialist authorities.

This unit would have the students up in the masts instead; to have them explore the world and map their journey through it, to make them navigators of their own identities and values. This unit introduces the concept of a cartography of the self. That is, by using the techniques and tools of mapmaking applied to our personal lives and literary stories, we can develop a much more clear and relevant sense of our own history, experiences, values, relationships, hopes, and fears. The aim of this practice is to give teachers and students, through the creation of a series of Life-Maps, a deeper understanding of who they are, what they value, where they wish to go, and who they wish to become. Map making of this kind is fundamentally empowering, as it necessitates the act of naming and ordering the world.

Through this unit, students will learn a broad narrative of the women's rights movement in the United States and elsewhere. We will begin with the present as to why there are still issues with equality among men and women, and search back through history for its causes. My objective will be to correct students’ misinformation and to encourage them to understand why gender inequality in its various forms--political, economic, and social--persists to the present day.

The inspirational examples of influential women will teach students the behaviors needed to succeed in the world. Case studies, informed by the CRAIGs structure, will be our starting point.