The curriculum unit that will follow will offer new ways to make poetry more accessible to eleventh and/or twelfth grade students. Specifically, I teach this unit to an Advanced Placement Literature class, but I have also taught it to a class of students with varying abilities, and found similar success. The school in which I have taught this unit is an arts and humanities magnet high school, which means that the class is comprised of students from various suburban towns as well as the urban center of New Haven whose primary goals surround the arts. My aim for this time around teaching this unit is to incorporate as much media into lessons as possible. Students tend to look upon video, audio, and internet material as neither ethical nor academic. I would like to show students that media resources can be beneficial if the correct resources are used. In doing so I hope that students will learn that typing their assignment title into the search box in Google just won't do the trick. This unit will consist of Internet-based lessons and assignments and a unit-end project that requires an Internet-ready presentation.
Assuming that all activities are performed well and that all performance objectives have been met, through this curriculum unit students will:
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- learn about the genre of political poetry and its uses in our culture.
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- What is political poetry?
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- Can students recognize political poetry?
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- Is there a purpose to political poetry?
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- Is there a place for the political within poetry?
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- understand that all eras in history have protest poems or lyrics.
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- What universals are consistent across all protest poems in history?
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- Have protest poems evolved or improved?
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- study the art of the protest poem by examining its elements
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- Specifically how does the poet use his or her subject, occasion, audience, purpose, speaker, tone, rhetoric, and poetic devices?
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- What is the intended message of the poem?
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- learn how to identify the presence of bias and propaganda in poetry.
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- Does the poet try to persuade with fear or intimidation?
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- Does he or she use myths or lies about America to persuade?
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- learn the preceding objectives through their study of poems and lyrics from multiple periods and various poets with differing perspectives on the political issues.
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- Revolutionary War Era
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- World War Era
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- Vietnam Conflict Era
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- Gulf Wars Era
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- connect political poetry with protest novels.
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Uncle Tom's Cabin
by Harriet Beecher Stowe
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The Heroic Slave
by Frederick Douglass
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- perform Internet-based lessons and assignments.
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- Follow links as described in daily lesson plans
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- Research websites that discuss the politicization of poetry
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- understand that all poetry is biased and there are at least two sides to every political issue.
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- Why is there a dichotomy when it comes to politics?
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- Is every issue really as black and white as it is assumed?
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create an Internet-ready multimedia presentation.
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- Create an innovative digital visual presentation, or
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- Turn the poem or lyrics into a complete song and video