Elizabeth A. Johnson
My belief is that we will never achieve academic proficiency until we address the whole child. In this unit, students will perform a scene from Romeo and Juliet. Additionally, they will keep a journal of their goals, motivations, obstacles, and actions, finally composing a polished journal response describing a choice they made based on their goals, motivations, and obstacles. These learning activities are designed for emotional and social development, which allows people to think about their effects on others. Social and emotional development precedes and is a prerequisite for cognitive development, which will be discussed later. This unit seeks to improve the character of our students because cognitive development cannot take place until social and emotional development do.
Urban education has lost focus on emotional and social development as a result of No Child Left Behind. Nearly ten years out, there is little evidence to suggest that the difference in test results leads to more thoughtful and intelligent citizens who are better able to participate in an American democracy. However, a curriculum built on emotional development as a pathway to cognitive development shows promise and results. By having a framework to examine the effects of one's actions on oneself and others, young adults can learn the best way to approach a situation even though a model has not yet existed for them. This rationale seeks to establish this.
Teaching emotional development and character education will come naturally to many teachers. There exists a trend in education called "affective teaching
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." In this model, teachers address a child's emotional, social, and personal needs and see this as the primary role in his or her profession. This is opposed to the teacher who sees his or her primary role as providing content and concepts. The Essential Question for this unit, "How do my decisions and actions affect myself and others?" reflects the current trend of affective education because the question forces students to work on social skills.
The first step in assessing "How do my actions and decisions affect myself and others?" is, paradoxically, for a child to look outside him or herself. This unit enables students to look at the character traits of fictional characters from Romeo and Juliet and assess their choices first before diving into the difficult enterprise of personal introspection.
To many, a reliance on the goodness of others may seem obvious as we have always had to rely in some way on others and their opinion of us. Today's youth, however, can very concretely achieve their goals through what seem like personal actions and minimal reliance on others. Indeed, this is one of the tenets of poverty: parentalization of youth, or taking care of yourself as well as those older than you. All this leads to personal reliance at the cost of a disdain for others, including elder others, and your relationship with them. Therefore, since factors outside of school lead to extreme individuality at the expense of empathy, empathy and responsible interactions must be explicitly taught in schools.
The lack of empathy for others may not strictly be a trait of an underprivileged citizen, however. A recent study by Sara Konrath, a researcher at the University of Michigan, shows that this generation of American college students has lower empathy than previous generations. The study found that students today are 40 percent less empathetic than students 30 years ago, with the biggest turnaround beginning in 2000. The implications of low empathy are severe. "Low empathy is associated with criminal behavior, violence, sexual offenses, aggression when drunk and other antisocial behaviors
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." Therefore, underprivileged urban students are not only the products of poor social models; they are also the products of a changing generation more impacted by antisocial products like video games, cell phones, personal computers, and social networking Internet sites. The need for explicit social education is greater now than ever before.
Explicit character education through emotional and social development may be achieved by integrating citizenship education with literature because the dynamic, classic characters of Shakespeare echo human behavior. Romeo and Juliet were very much concerned with their own well-being and yet were directly affected by the actions and reactions of others. For example, the couple's desire to be together was not enough. They needed the approval of others: their families. Without this approval, they were powerless to impact their own lives and passions. Students reading Romeo and Juliet are quick to place blame on the families, rightfully outraged at no explanation of their feud. Critical examination of literature is not only an academic pursuit: it is a legitimate opportunity to scrutinize others and examine their goals, motivations, obstacles, and actions.
The need to teach the complexities of good intentions versus actions was underscored during a recent conversation with a freshman student. She was involved in a potential fight between herself and another young woman. It was a matter of "he said, she said," according to the student. When I asked her what was going to happen, she said, "whatever happens, happens." When asked to explain, she elaborated, saying, "If there's gonna be a fight, that's it."
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"So you don't think the fight would be anybody's fault?" I asked.
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"No, it's just gonna happen," replied my student.
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I further pushed my student to think about Romeo and Juliet, since we had recently
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finished reading the play. I asked, "Did they have to die?"
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"Maybe," she replied.
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I asked again, "So whose fault would that be?"
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"Maybe theirs."
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"So it is someone's fault," I returned.
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"Yeah, maybe."
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"Maybe your fight would be someone's fault?" I pressed on.
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The student paused, "Well, maybe. I don't know!"
This exchange highlighted in me the importance of precognition, or thinking before acting. In order to do this, a person must have a model or set of learned behaviors. Of course, when new problems arise, how does a person deal with them if they have never encountered them before? The behaviors can be modeled and rehearsed, which can be achieved through improvisation.
Also on the rise in research is the inclusion of performance and improvisation into school settings. Psychologist Lev Vigotsky's Social Development Theory was written during the Russian Revolution but is widely accepted in child psychology today. Vigotsky theorized that social interaction precedes development
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. In other words, children must work together in order to develop. Vigotsky also theorized that children see everything twice: first when they see another person behave and then when they do it themselves. In this way, a child must interact with, not just analyze, a positive model in order to replicate it. If an individual never experiences something or is never shown, how can he or she do it? A contemporary performance event entitled "Performing the World" seeks to use this theory to bring together people of all backgrounds in an effort to create understanding and greater cooperation between nations and peoples. The event creators seek to discuss "the subject of performance and the transformation of the individual, the community, and the world
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". Several participants in the 2007 "Performing the World" event used acting and improvisation to encourage cooperation, self-esteem, and self-motivation in urban youth. More than research, this is theory into action. Since both Vigotsky's theory and the most recent events in research suggest that performance and social interaction precede cognitive development, the two will go hand-in-hand in this unit.
It is important to note that the research relating emotional development to classroom behavior is incomplete. Roundtable discussions in 2005 and 2006 by leaders in the education field, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) and the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD) came to this conclusion. One study that was cited in their report compared the aspirations of parents with and without college degrees. The children of college educated parents with high aspirations were able to succeed academically and socially due to parental involvement. However, parents who were not college-educated were no less involved in setting aspirations for their children, but their children were not able to change social behavior and academic outcomes. Overall, "non-college educated parents could communicate a high level of aspiration but could not effectively change their child's behavior in ways that would prepare students to achieve their aspirations
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". This suggests that explicit education on good behavior is necessary to achieving the aspirations of many parents and their children. This unit seeks to do that.