For this assignment, we will work in class for a couple of days to first decide the community that my students want to research. To help them in this task, I will start class with a quick discussion of what their concept of "community" is. They might know it at this point of the unit but I also know that some might still not have a clear understanding and the class discussion, the peers' definition of the concept will certainly help them. While they are sharing their thoughts, I will write their definitions of community. Once this concept is clear to everyone, I will ask them to start thinking what community they want to study. It can be any community from the class community to a larger one as the neighborhood. Once this has been defined, our second step is to determine where to start from and how to research. The other important element they need to consider is the theme around which they want to start their investigation. This thematic idea can be one of the themes from Heart of Darkness (greed, power, evilness, and/or isolation) for the AP students and Lord of the Flies (authority/power, evilness, survival, respect) for the sophomore students, or race, gender, peer pressure, heritage, college (both AP students and sophomores can choose this theme because it is a very important focus in our school and in the New Haven District schools too), isolation, and/or violent crime.
Always in groups, my students will decide whether they just want to interview the members of the community or whether they want to use interviews and other means like videos, selfies, photographs, research for information published in newspapers or even research of social media. I will suggest using any possible means to record evidence about the chosen community. For the interview questions, I will teach them how to phrase the questions. Specifically, I will hand out a model with the following examples:
|
1.
|
Introduce yourself to the interviewee and explain what is the topic of your study
|
|
2.
|
Start by asking biographical information
|
|
3.
|
If your theme is peer pressure, you might ask how the interviewee interacts with the peers in the community. Also, ask the interviewee to give you specific examples of his/her interactions
|
|
4.
|
Let the person you are interviewing talk. If he/she does not give you too much information, ask how he/she feels, thinks, or reacts and why
|
|
5.
|
Ask what is their vision of the community
|
|
6.
|
If the interviewee does not tell you much, intervene with a series of questions related to what he/she started telling you. Also, remember to ask how and why so you can collect more evidence.
|
I will assign this as homework but I will also build in few in-class discussions to understand where they are with the project and discuss the difficulty they encounter. During these in-class discussions, we will share as a whole group so the most struggling students can hear how their peers have collected information and/or conducted the interviews. After that, I will divide them in groups and they will discuss their research, problems, and/or outcome before drafting a "plan of action" for the next step of their investigation. I expect to have these in-class activities at least once a week or more according to the students' needs.
When the students have completed the collection of evidence, they will prepare a presentation (they can use power point for photographs and videos) and a written paper (informative essay according to the new Common Core standards) describing the community and how this community reacts to the theme of their research, how they interpret it, how they feel about it, and how they cope with it. I will also require them to conclude their research paper with a theory of their own explaining the reasons/rationale behind the reactions, feelings, and relationships the community members have expressed. The students will present the results of their research to the class and if we can have the main stage for one day to the entire school too.
