In addition to their daily formative assessments such as reading responses, answering text-dependent questions based on close readings, reflection writing pieces, and oral discussion, students will be required to conduct research in order to complete the summative task of the unit which is to compose a journal from the point of view of a middle school student struggling with the school segregation during the Jim Crow era.
The culminating project of this unit will be a character journal activity in which students will take the voice of one of different minority 5th or 6th grade students dealing with school segregation during the unit-covered time period. Students will be required to demonstrate various aspects of their learning, including the period, location, social contexts, and emotional/psychological effects of school segregation that were specific to each of the three minority groups that they are embodying through their writing. These student journals will be transferred into digital format and compiled on a class website which will be structured as a teaching tool, where students will take what they have learning about educational discrimination during the Jim Crow era and apply it in order to create an educational resources for their peers about a topic that often evades student background knowledge and our district curriculum.
In order to complete this final project, students will be required to research examples of educational discrimination in order to gain an understanding of what types of challenges students faced in different settings. Students will need to identify the facts of these various school segregation examples, as well as the social concerns specific to that region and setting.
Enduring Understandings
-
|
The history of the United States is filled with examples of legal discrimination against all minority groups, particularly in the period between Emancipation and the Civil Rights movement.
|
-
|
Jim Crow laws were racial segregation laws that were enacted between the 1870s and 1960s primarily at the state and local level.
|
-
|
Throughout the Jim Crow era, school segregation was an accepted practice that severely limited the prospects of minority students.
|
In order to reach these understandings with my students, a variety of teachings strategies will be employed. For a diverse set of students with reading levels ranging from Kindergarten to 6th grade equivalencies, there must be a solid and consistent use of visual aides to support any types of readings, regardless of complexity. In order to address this while analyzing court cases, I will present photographs of segregated schools and of the parties to the case at the outset of each case study. In addition, supplemental readings, which will be more accessible to students in terms of their reading level, should be provided to students for each of the cases studies. These supplemental readings should include summaries tailored to upper elementary level students and also local newspaper articles from the time period that will help students access the issue that sparked the various cases they will study.
To scaffold student research, it is suggested that several lessons that should be completed prior to the unit to ensure that the basic skills of identifying key search terms, reliable vs. unreliable sources, etc. During the curriculum unit, students will not be conducting research on the entire web. Instead, students will use a custom Google search, in which the teacher will pre-determine the sites from which students will draw information. These will be sites that the teacher has screened to ensure that the content is appropriate, relevant, and fruitful for student review.
Curriculum Unit Map