The essential question for this unit was, “What do cultures bring to a community?”
This guiding question allowed students to think about what cultures and differences bring to enrich a community. They accessed this question during the lessons as well as beyond the activities they completed in school. This question requires students to think about what culture is, what a community is, and how we interact in both of those realms. By tying in personal, authentic connections, students will also be able to see themselves in these concepts. Migration, immigration, and movement are all part of which communities we belong to and why. Students connected back to this essential question throughout all the lessons and built an idea around why diverse communities are so enriching and important.
How does this unit develop content understanding of key concepts and ideas?
The following learning goals focus on connecting students with content standards through meaningful and intentional application of collaborative skills, researching skills, interviewing skills, and metacognitive skills.
- Students will be able to interview a family member regarding their family’s own culture and migration experiences.
- Students will be able to reason what the Statue of Liberty stands for and why it is an example showing America as a “nation of immigrants”.
- Students will be able to apply new vocabulary to comprehend the “New Colossus.”
- Students will be able to define what “culture” is and identify the main elements of a culture.
- Students will be able to discover evidence of culture in familiar texts (Grandfather Counts, Have A Good Day Cafe, Home At Last, etc.) as well as new texts (The Talking Cloth).
- Students will be able to collaborate in constructing a running list of evidence of culture found in text.
- Students will be able to conjure multiple reasons why people might move and migrate through reflective writing connecting to relevant texts.
- Students will be able to investigate one aspect (food, location, nationality, language, or traditions) of a culture in our class.
- Students will be able to communicate and share their findings with others using recordings.
- Students will be able to make connections between themselves and the content through personal experience or connection to classmates.
How does this unit enable students to experience the power of their minds and their capacities as learners and doers?
This unit allows my students to see themselves as part of the content. This unit was not designed to feel foreign and removed. Culture is not something that exists outside of us in the world, removed from personal experiences, it is us. This unit was designed to give space and opportunity for students to master content and connect to oneself and show a deep understanding of how their own lives appear in content. They can access their emotional intelligence and empathize with others, pertaining to involuntary immmigration specifically. They access their social intelligence through collaboration and teamwork. They expand their minds and understandings about what migration and culture are and their impact on our communities.
How does this unit develop intellectual and academic habits of mind, work, and discourse within the discipline?
This unit encourages the development of academic habits of mind through practicing necessary skills needed to grow as intellectual learners. Students act as historians and social scientists. They are practicing their ways of knowing as social scientists by being interviewers, investigators, empaths, researchers, explorers, experts, collaborators, and many more throughout this unit. Specifically, when students interview their families, they are independently practicing the skill of asking questions and recording someone else’s answers. When they find and record evidence of culture within texts, they are practicing pulling examples from trusted sources. Collaboration in small groups, sharing, valuing others opinions and thoughts, and other group-work skills are reinforced in lessons 2, 4 and 5 in this unit. Learning to academically work together is a necessary way of thinking needed in school for learning. Students are refining the skills needed across disciplines.
As for practice standards, in History and Social Sciences, Guiding Principle 2 reads, “An effective history and social science education incorporates diverse perspectives and acknowledges that perceptions of events are affected by race, ethnicity, culture, religion, education, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, and personal experience.” The content around culture and identity as well as where we come from, our nationality, and ethnicity/race are all part of this conversation. By honoring students’ perspectives and experiences and decentering my own, I am giving students the stage to become social scientists of themselves in the content. Additionally, Guiding Principle 5 reads, “An effective history and social science education integrates knowledge from many fields of study.” These two guiding principles are tied into every lesson in this unit. I tie in literacy and writing frequently and also art skills, collaboration and teamwork, and speaking/listening skills.
How does this unit support literacy development?
This unit incorporates literacy development often. There are multiple read alouds of new texts, review of familiar texts, exposure to poetry, work with vocabulary, defining “culture” and “immigrant,” independent reading of recipes, writing about texts, recording information from interviews, reading maps and charts, and many more. Students practice speaking and listening skills in turn and talks, share-outs, and the multiple examples of group work and collaboration exercises. Despite the use of word banks, sentence stems and starters, students used visual aids and resources to develop their thoughts and ideas on the topic coherently and eloquently. By using literature and writing often, students sharpen and enhance multiple cross-course skill sets.
How does this unit develop trust and classroom community?
This unit is extremely impactful for building a classroom community. Students have to engage with each other in every lesson to some degree. Collaboration was a guiding principle in this lesson, and has traces in every lesson plan. Students worked in different groups each time, each serving a different purpose or studying a different thing. Some were randomized, some based on reading or writing ability, some based off of personal experiences with the culture at hand. Students got a chance to work with new students they may not have had much chance to yet this year. I also made sure to randomize the sharing groups in the cultural exploration lessons to allow everyone’s voice be heard and all students to share their expertise with their classmates and myself. I am also very proud of the weight of using students’ own identities and cultures in my lesson planning. By honoring their experiences and identities, students found opportunities to speak and share out about the content and themselves. Others listened some days and shared on other days. I felt as though almost all my students felt reflected in some way in the content of at least two lessons. This brought us together as a diverse community with different cultures which enrich our collective experiences including our learning.
How does this unit position and empower students to “read the world” and act in it in support of equity and social justice?
Although it can be difficult to imagine second graders as social justice advocates, I am confident that this unit and lessons orient them in a way to help them develop a view of the world that can empower them to take action. First, they must learn to “read the world.” By understanding what culture is and what communities are, students can develop this idea and lens to see the world with empathy and compassion for others. As for acting in support of equity and social justice, students practice reflecting on emotions throughout the course of the unit. During the migration lessons, students question what it may be like to have to move away from a place or people you love for reasons you cannot control such as war or natural disasters. Students use their prior experiences and knowledge to form opinions around what forced migration may feel like. This humanizes the content and relates it back to them. Students also focus on what America’s role in migration is through the Statue of Liberty lessons. By recognizing America as “a nation of immigrants” and that the Statue of Liberty stands for welcoming immigrants into our nation, students begin to think about the empathy and morality around migration. Immigration is a very sensitive and impactful issue for America and for my students. The focus this unit takes will empower them to make decisions to fight for equity and social justice around these issues when they are exposed to them. This base of knowledge will help them have empathy and background to handle the gravity and depth of this issue.
How did I, as the instructor, take into account any differences in my socioeconomic, cultural, or racial background, gender, personality, approach to learning, or view of the world and what assumptions did I make about why my plan will connect to my Main South students?
I am assuming these lessons will connect to my students because I assume each other them have prior experiences interacting with different cultures in their lives. I thought about how my students come from a variety of cultural backgrounds themselves and through previous lessons and conversations, I assume they will enjoy sharing these parts of themselves and connecting personally to content. I assume that my students will come with possible trauma of immigration, migration, and experiences moving with and away from family and loved ones. This means I approach that standard and those lessons with an idea about what some students may possibly be feeling or reliving. I also assume my students know about themselves and where their families are from. It has been talked about in class already, so I assume they have access to that information readily themselves or through their families.
In addition to those assumptions, I am aware that many of my students have different cultural, racial, and socioeconomic experiences than I do. In a unit about culture, I am aware that my Irish and Polish culture may be foreign to my students. My experiences and examples may not resonate. I am aware that many of my students’ religion is tightly woven into their cultural identities. Their communities are based in activities, such as their school or their church. I do not identify with any religion, so this is a foreign territory for me. I also recognize that because my students are entirely students of color, my identity around my culture and race and nationality was never a painful experience growing up. These differences can be challenging as I have privilege in this identity but they do not need to impede our curiosity and exploration of our differences. By de-centering my own experiences and instead honoring my student’s identities and cultures, I plan to shift the discussion towards them, giving them the power of discussion and authentic ownership over the ideas of what is “culture.”