James P. Brochin
The unit is to be used in a large urban public school with great diversity among ethnic groups and levels of past academic preparation. It would be taught in US History II and/or Civics The target audience would be eleventh grade. Although this unit was written for “college” (middle level) and honors students, with the proper modifications it could be taught at any level, including basic level and to non-native speaking students (taught in English).
The material for the unit is designed to be covered in ten sessions, divided into roughly three sections:
Section One
: Historical precedents for wartime limitations on the First Amendment;
Section Two
: The drama of the Cold War, fear of Communist expansion, the Arms race, and the McCarthy Era; and
Section Three
: Fear of the “other”, fear of infiltration, terror within the country, recent limitations on civil liberties of foreigners, especially Islamic people, after 9/11.
These lessons were written for use with a combination of 45 minute and 90 minute classes. The longer classes will enable the teacher to use various classroom materials and teaching methods.
The primary teaching method will consist of class discussion, using primary sources such first person accounts.
Assessments will be in the forms of writing critical and persuasive pieces during the Unit in the five paragraph format used for the CAPT test, an end of Unit written examination, at least one inquiry lesson, and a debate/discussion which will be posted on the Internet as a Podcast. The inquiry lesson may have a due date of well after the completion of the Unit. One of the inquiry lessons would involve students investigating Mark Klein’s initial discovery of the switch room at AT&T and his resulting actions.
Recommendations for prior knowledge
Ideally, the following topics should have been studied in depth, or at least touched upon, in this course or other courses, prior to beginning this Unit: the Constitutional Convention and the Bill of Rights, the Salem Witch Trials, World War I and the 1920’s Red Scare; the Cold War, and the events of 9/11.
Resources
Resources for teacher and students include those that are contained in the annotated bibliography; there are some secondary sources such as
The Politics of Fear.
More important for the daily classroom use, are the primary sources, such as Mark Klein’s accounts of his discovery of the NSA program. The teacher resources help the teacher in getting a detailed background of the subject matter, in preparing assessments, leading discussions, preparing question for the students in alignment with the objectives elaborated below. The student reading material will include periodicals from the Cold War, articles with will form the basis of CAPT type essays, segment of a number of the books and some readings from Internet sources e.g. Arthur Miller’s
The Crucible
and Ray Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451, Good Night and Good Luck,
and the President’s and Congress’ responses to Mark Klein’s and the media’s exposure of the NSA program
.
These will assist the students in gaining a basic background in the subject matter, include primary sources aimed at enabling the students to know how people felt and thought at the time Classroom materials include a slide show, films of various types, audio recordings, handouts of student reading list materials, an inquiry lesson assignment, and other segment of various readings, and segments of books. These directly relate to the goals of the Unit in that they are among the most effective at engaging the students, through primary sources and films.
The following are three sample lesson plans out of a total maximum of eight lesson plans (two teaching weeks: three 45 minute classes and one 90 minute class).