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.

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.

The course is structured in theme-based quarters; each quarter targets a mode of writing (argumentative, persuasive, analytical) paired with a thematic unit of study. No texts are mandated, but texts are suggested to align with each theme. Though teachers have the flexibility to teach texts that they believe will best engage and push their students to a deeper understanding of the targeted standards, I became more and more aware of a lack of depth to the curriculum’s nature writing unit.

The district-endorsed unit, titled “Self and Nature: Exploring Human Relationships with Nature” recommends texts that are familiar to many English teachers as the canon of American transcendentalism, the 19th-century literary and philosophical movement advocating for the unity of nature, the divine, and humanity. Some suggestions outside of that realm are recommended (Rachel Carson, Jack London, Jon Krakauer), but even these more modern suggestions do very little to tell a more accurate and complete story of human’s place in the environment.

The focus of this curricular unit is twofold. The first is to consider the math classroom as a racialized space. In doing so, the unit will shed light on why math education is not race-neutral and will explain how color-blindness reinforces the oppression of students of color. The unit will examine how color-blindness within mathematics education ignores historical data and blames academic failure on students, their families, and their communities without recognizing the systemic biases that reproduce racial inequality through material stratification, deficiency framing, and reduced access to high quality instruction.

The second part of the unit will consider anti-racist teacher-centered instructional strategies that directly address inequality in math instruction. Among these strategies, the unit will consider teaching for understanding, group participation through complex instruction, culturally relevant pedagogy, and teaching mathematics for social justice. To achieve this, the unit will provide several examples of activities that approach mathematics instruction from a culturally relevant and critical lens. Then, the unit will examine a brief race-neutral Calculus lesson on integral approximation and will highlight components that reinforce systemic racism. Finally, the unit will then address what changes must be made within the sample lesson to better address issues pertaining to race in the math classroom.

I am a general education middle school English Language Arts teacher and have taught this novel using traditional English Language Arts strategies. I have primarily used this novel to meet reading objectives during my poetry unit to teach students about the novel’s literary devices such as imagery, personification, and metaphor for example. Lessons often examined how literary devices gave insight into the character’s motivations and would then scaffold learning into character analysis. The novel also explores themes of culture and identity, so initiating activities would build discussion on how House on Mango Street connects to other novels my students may have read. Discussions would center on popular young adult literature (and in some cases, the movie adaptation) about immigrant- minority culture and experiences such as The Sun is Also a Star (Yoon, 2016), The Arrival (Tan, 2006), The Hate You Give (Thomas, 2017), and Americanized (Saedi, 2018). Connections made between these novels would serve as an entry point building students’ background knowledge and used as reference points during lessons. Learning objective outcomes concluded with a writing project where students would write personal narratives and vignettes in the author's poetic style. This unit presents an instructional shift that incorporates culturally relevant pedagogical frameworks into novel study to foreground issues of race, racism, and power that underpin the novel.

Students will engage in viewing and researching videos and artifacts about thriving black communities that developed in the early 20th century amidst the violence of Jim Crow. The dominant narrative about US History from the end of Reconstruction to the mid-20th century has often portrayed Black people as hopeless and destitute. In reality, many Black people left the south, moved north or Midwest to establish flourishing communities. Black communities in Tulsa, Knoxville and Chicago were making great progress in the first two decades of the 20th century. But during the Red Summer of 1919, the aforementioned communities and others were burned down by white mobs and never rebuilt. One community was burned down and filled in with water, later becoming a lake. These mobs murdered blacks, decimated their townships, and then attempted to conceal this history, often erasing it entirely from history books.

Students’ culminating project is research, documentation, and presentation of their findings through a student-led Community Action Event.

This unit is written for high school French 3 and 4, and it focuses on interpreting historical events while building up background knowledge. It creates an overall awareness about the French-speaking world rather than memorizing grammar structures and rules often emphasized in language learning. Our curriculum is designed to give the teachers leniency to expand and use history, art, culture, and cross-disciplinary topics. Students in French 3 and 4 can explore various themes independently – under the overarching themes of contemporary and standardized French language teaching. As students move from levels 1 and 2 to 3 and 4, the task difficulty increases as students go through stages of second language acquisition. Precisely, in levels 1 and 2, our curriculum, although thematic, focuses more on vocabulary, which is often contextualized. Hence, in French 3 and 4, the tasks become more cognitively demanding. The context becomes less evident as we go from conversational scenes to interpreting facts, giving opinions, and expressing thoughts in speaking and writing.

I decided to take this seminar because in my career as a literature teacher, neither myself, nor my students, have ever felt collective joy engaging with narrative writing. My students have experienced an entire spectrum of emotion engaging with family, school, work, and all other institutions of society, yet when it comes down to choosing what to write, and actually writing, there comes an immense emotional and cognitive struggle in both brainstorming and production. I have students who participate in youth groups, volunteer work, are life-long athletes, commute to school every day at 5 am, yet choose to write about the stress and eventual success of math class. I have students who have participated in organized protests, work near full time jobs, and experience moments of existential and cultural realizations simply by engaging in conversation at dinner, yet choose to write about overcoming procrastination. I’ve sought out and attended professional development, asked advice not only locally, but all over the country, and have done extensive research in finding a solution to no avail. The vast majority of training, practices and advice I found approaches narrative writing as stagnant, and therefore, were ultimately just different approaches leading to the replicated result of forced-structured, inauthentic writing, that sounds like an individual different from my students.

What I haven’t done, despite it being so clear, and what I’m sure I’ve unconsciously avoided, is approach revising my practice while analyzing through a lens of race, power and identity. Teaching students writing techniques and how to use them correctly has never been a struggle. The struggle is widespread silence, and exclamations of “I don’t know what to write” and “I have nothing interesting to write about.” The struggle is grading and providing feedback to stories involving death, trauma, and raw human emotion, in no commas, periods, or sentences. I am not only looking to make small adjustments for temporary moments of success, I am seeking sustainable transformation--and my experience learning this seminar is a start. In my research, I have learned history, language, and patterns that speak to the tension I am describing in not only narrative writing, but education at large. Through an exploration of anti-racist theory, I have learned new ways to think, frame and ultimately approach teaching the personal narrative. Through researching the work of experienced, and critically conscious educators, I have found many resources, and also, outlined an approach I have never attempted. Moving forward, I will curate big-picture factors and history leading to the dominant practices in my classroom, and also, give perspective on the fallacy of these practices. I will then curate the teaching methods to counter the dominant approaches aiming for a more unifying, reflective, rich, complex and anti-racist- approach in preparing for and teaching students to write a personal narrative.

This unit grew out of a desire to make research in my English classroom more actionable. Every year sophomore students at our local urban magnet high school participate in a year long Social Justice Project of their choice. At the beginning of this year, when I asked my students to define social justice I received a variety of honest answers. One sophomore identified social justice as a negative term, a concept people claim to achieve in posturing but fail in action. Some students struggled to identify the impact of social justice in their communities, stating that the issues such as racism and gun violence were real, but they were unfamiliar with any leaders in their communities who were actively seeking to change things for the better.

While performing research on social justice issues, I noticed that students felt the compulsory need to use formal procedures to verify knowledge. When one student leaned deeply into conducting interviews with rappers in the community to learn about representation in the industry, he at first mentioned that he didn’t feel as though he was completing “real research”. In fact, as his classmates dug through databases constantly reframing their search terms to stretch for new information, they looked at him questionably and doubted the validity of his project. Individuals in the class also felt tension from learning objectives that required students to research multiple perspectives. To achieve this objective, students researching topics such as police brutality were asked to research a perspective that dehumanized and challenged their and their community’s lived experiences.

While the objectives of the original social justice research unit were well intentioned, they fell short in delivering on the most important aspects of social justice: the need for specific and localized action and a disruption of a colorblind ideology in research methods. The following unit seeks to identify and disrupt dominant narratives in social justice education and research. More importantly, the unit seeks to provide counter practices that make the ideals of social justice actionable by incorporating the methods of researchers from Latinx and Indigenous communities and tools for holding space for education through community discussion.

Within this unit, I will take a three level design that is planned to make these courses more relevant to students and promote questions that interrogate the authority of statistics that students will encounter throughout the course and in their lives.

The skill of interrogating statistics is crucial for all adults in our society to become thinking consumers and users of data. In addition, it is important to deconstruct data to see implicit ideas of domination and subjugation that travel through numbers that can appear nuetral. Statistics shares a creation story with the field of Eugenics. Francis Galton, a mathematician who contributed many of the major ideas to statistics was also one of the originators of eugenics. The influence of eugenic thinking in statistics drives a notion of superiority, fitness and ranking alongside measurements. Milton Reynolds describes this in Shifting Frames:,” The term “eugenics” refers to a scientifically based, ideological movement dedicated to the reiification of race. It is the wellspring of scientific theories used to construct taxonomies of difference within the human family and to legitimize the subjugation of different groups.”.1 Statistics often does the work of justifying this subjugation through its “innocent” and authoritative work as a logical system. These embedded assumptions of superiority are validated by the seeming neutrality of mathematical calculations. The “taxonomies of difference” he describes are invalid and biased assumptions about difference that dominate our interpretations of data, however they appear as factual products legitimized by math.

Within the last few years, the demographics of Barnard Environmental Science and Technology School has changed significantly. When I began teaching there four years ago, there was a large Multilingual (ML) population, but not enough to have a full-time ML teacher. The majority of the students who qualified for ML services spoke Spanish. In my first year of teaching at Barnard in 2017, the school began enrolling refugee families from Western Asia, primarily Afghanistan. Between 2017 and 2020 the number of students from Afghanistan rose exponentially, to the point where not only did the school administration make the original ML teacher full-time, but also decided to hire another full-time teacher, which is how I came to have my current job. As of 2021, very close to 50% of the ML students at Barnard speak Pashto, one of the languages of Afghanistan. Spanish is the second most spoken language, followed by Arabic.

I have been looking at the materials that the district has provided as well as what the school might be able to purchase in the future. Most of what I see for Newcomer and refugee students are textbooks explaining how to survive in a traditional American school. There are common phrases, basic English and many smiling faces. These textbooks can be useful, but they oversimplify or do not address the complexities of what it means to be an American, an immigrant or a refugee. They do not address how and why English came to be the language of this country or the racialized structure of U.S. society. They certainly do not touch on the role race (and racism) have in “English as a Second Language” education. By curating resources at various English language levels that positively affirm the identity of multilingual, immigrant, and refugee students, the connection to the content will become more meaningful. Allowing students to have an active role in curating the content and being able to tell their own stories will ensure that the narratives showcase their personal identity and present the message that they would like others to see.

Rationale: Oftentimes, ML students, especially Newcomers, are seen as being in a deficit because they do not know English or are still learning English. They are excluded from many in-class activities and assignments. I want to disrupt this assumption about ML students as not being able to understand concepts that may be more complicated or require analysis and higher order thinking skills, like racism and its effects on education. Instead, I want ML students to feel as though they can not only grasp the content, but contribute to a better understanding for everyone through authentic representation and sharing of their experiences, languages, and cultures.