Guide to Curriculum Units by Fellows of the Yale National Initiative 2013

In April 2013 the Yale National Initiative to strengthen teaching in public schools^® accepted sixty-five public school teachers from sixteen school districts in nine states to participate in six national seminars held at Yale. The Initiative is a long-term endeavor to influence public policy on teacher professional development, in part by establishing exemplary Teachers Institutes for high-need schools in states around the country.

Following the approach developed in New Haven and implemented in other cities, Teachers Institutes are educational partnerships between universities and school districts designed to strengthen teaching and learning in a community's public schools. Evaluations have shown that the Institute approach exemplifies the characteristics of high-quality teacher professional development, enhances teacher quality in the ways known to improve student achievement, and encourages participants to remain in teaching in their schools.

Forty of the Yale National Fellows came from school districts that are planning or exploring the establishment of a new Teachers Institute for Chicago, IL; Diné Nation, AZ; Emeryville, CA; Richmond, VA; San José, CA; San Mateo County, CA, and Tulsa, OK. Other National Fellows came from Teachers Institutes that are members of the League of Teachers Institutes^® located in Charlotte, NC; New Castle County, DE; New Haven, CT; Philadelphia, PA; and Pittsburgh, PA. Overall, more than half of the Yale National Fellows were participating for the first time.

The National Fellows attended an Organizational Session of the seminars held in New Haven on May 3-4. The seminars reconvened during a ten-day Intensive Session from July 8-19 and concluded in mid-August when the Fellows submitted their completed curriculum units. The six seminars were:

- "Energy Sciences," led by Gary W. Brudvig, Professor of Chemistry and of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry;

- "Picture Writing," led by Janice Carlisle, Professor of English;

- "Interpreting Texts, Making Meaning: Starting Small," led by Paul H. Fry, Professor of English;

- "The Art of Biography," led by John L. Gaddis, Professor of History and of Political Science;

- "Invisible Cities: The Arts and Renewable Community," led by Joseph R. Roach, Sterling Professor of Theater and Professor of English, of African American Studies, and of American Studies; and

- "Genetic Engineering and Human Health," led by W. Mark Saltzman, Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering.

The dual purposes of the program are to provide public school teachers deeper knowledge of the subjects they teach and first-hand experience with the Teachers Institute approach. This increases their leadership in an existing Teachers Institute or prepares them to lead the development of a new Teachers Institute. Each participating teacher writes a curriculum unit to teach his or her students about the seminar subject and to share with other teachers in their school district and, over the Internet, with teachers anywhere. The curriculum units contain five elements: content objectives, teaching strategies, examples of classroom activities, lists of resources for teachers and students, and an appendix on the district academic standards the unit implements.

The curriculum units National Fellows wrote are their own; they are presented in six volumes, one for each seminar.

The Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute^® is a permanently endowed unit of Yale University, which undertook the National Initiative in 2004.

James R. Vivian

New Haven

August 2013

For nearly three thousand years, philosophers have been fascinated by and worried about the relation between words and images. Some formulations stress the similarities between the two media, as Simonides did in the sixth century BCE when he called poetry "a speaking picture." Other thinkers emphasize the differences between word and image, as Lessing did in the eighteenth century when he called them "friendly neighbors" who, despite their neighborliness, should always be separated by a strong fence. More recently, one literary theorist, W. J. T. Mitchell, has argued that there is no image without words and no word without images: all representations, verbal and visual, are, according to Mitchell, "imagetexts." How words work with or against images and how images work with or against words are topics that have become increasingly relevant in the past decade, even though – or perhaps especially because – we live, as postmodern theorists tell us, in an age of simulacra, an age in which images have taken the place not only of words but also of things.

The readings and topics and, most important, the units written for this seminar explore the various ways in which pictures write, the ways in which they communicate information and meaning; but they also explore how writing creates images, how it pictures. There are numbers of ways in which the two media combine: pictures may constitute languages like those built up out of words, pictures often make claims or tell stories, words can morph into pictures, and, most often, words define or explain pictures, just as pictures illustrate words. Central to many of our discussions in this seminar were the ideas that Scott McCloud develops in the sixth chapter of Understanding Comics when he sets out different possible ratios between writing and pictures. But we also explored Otto Neurath's attempts in the 1930s to create a universal language of symbols called ISOTYPE and Susan Sontag's famous attack on images that applied to the 1970s the lessons of Plato's cave. The purest example of picture writing that we read is a novel by Lynd Ward that he wrote entirely in wood engravings. Other readings were classic examples of works created by the interaction of words and images: William Hogarth's narrative in pictures, Industry and Idleness; The Story of Ferdinand, a picture book by Monroe Leaf; and two recent graphic tales, V for Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Included among the theorists who provided perspectives on this material were, along with McCloud, Edward R. Tufte, J. Hillis Miller, and W. J. T. Mitchell. Visits to the Yale Center for British Art and the Peabody Museum allowed us to think about the kind of teaching that is made possible when students are challenged to use words to make sense of the art objects or cultural artifacts that they are seeing.

Two of the Fellows in the seminar provide in their curriculum units compelling statements about the nature and significance of its subject. Matthew Kelly points out the pressing need to understand how images function – how they create a particular kind of meaning with a particular kind of power – when he uses the term art to encompass all forms of visual imagery:

. . . media literacy – another name for the ability to use images, interpret images, and place images in context – is a relatively new emphasis in our comprehensive curriculum. While media literacy is usually construed in terms of electronic media, the truth is that almost every manufactured or artificially prepared surface that students see is designed or decorated in a way intended to influence their attitudes or behavior. They absorb, as we do, symbols and images telling them what to buy and how the things they buy establish social status. They are conditioned to obey these messages as unconsciously as we adults follow the yellow lines telling us not to drive into opposing traffic on the way to work. These symbols are created by professionals, professionals who have honed the tools of their craft in the tool shed of the fine arts and design. If students need to know one thing about images, it's this: art is all around us, and it's asking for your money. Art is everywhere, and it wants your brain.

Crecia Cipriano, who was the coordinator of the seminar, puts very clearly in her unit the conclusions that we reached when we had finished our readings and discussions:

Throughout the course of this seminar in Picture Writing, we have discussed the complex interplay between words and images, dissecting varied levels of effectiveness in terms of expression of information. A clear, uncluttered, and meaningfully selected or created image can say more on its own than it would if language were to be lazily or carelessly added, just as an effective and purposeful linguistic message might be obscured by vague or overpowering images. But when both language and image are consciously and carefully selected and combined, words and image can work in synergy to convey meaning most clearly, on perhaps a more holistically felt level.

As these two excerpts suggest, the subject of the relation between words and images became less a problem to solve than an opportunity to think about the communicative potential of two fundamental forms of media.

During the seminar the Fellows and I visited the Yale Center for British Art, as I had done with another group of Fellows in 2011. The results of our conversations there were as remarkable in 2013 as they had been two years earlier. Sheila McBride explains in her unit how we went about discussing a specific painting by J. M. W. Turner titled Wreckers – Coast of Northumberland, with a Steam-Boat Assisting a Ship off Shore. Half of the Fellows were asked

to notice visual features and elements of a painting at the [YCBA]without allowing us access to the painting's title or wall notes. Only after extended noticing and naming of what we could see, were we encouraged to interpret, analyze, and finally view the wall notes about the painting. Our discussion of this painting was much deeper, more insightful, extensive, and exciting than of other paintings where we did not follow this process.

This exercise allowed us to test a method of looking at images developed by Linda Friedlaender, Curator of Education at the YCBA, in collaboration with Dr. Irwin Braverman of the Yale School of Medicine. This pedagogical approach has been widely employed at the YCBA with students ranging from those attending kindergarten to those in medical school. First-year medical students, for instance, are trained to be better observers and therefore better diagnosticians. The means to that end are deceptively simple: those looking at an art object for the first time are asked to do precisely that – to look without the aid of any other information than what the piece of art itself offers. Only after all the details of, say, a painting have been noted is the viewer encouraged to offer an interpretation of those details (see http://news.yale.edu/2009/04/10/class-helping-future-doctors-learn-art-observation). On our visit to the YCBA, we complicated this process a bit by designating the rest of the Fellows as a kind of control group: they examined Wreckers, again looking carefully before interpreting, but they were told in advance its title, and they were given the information about it on the wall label: painted by Turner in the first half of the 1830s, it depicts a scene during a furious storm as people on the shore gather the debris from a ship that is breaking apart. As the wall label explains, wreckers were groups of people who lured ships onto rocks or other dangers so that they could salvage their contents when they went aground.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Wreckers – Coast of Northumberland, with a Steam-Boat Assisting a Ship off Shore (1833 and 1834), oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

By seeing what happens when viewers of an art object are challenged to look at it before being told what it is or what it means, we were experimenting with an approach that is particularly pertinent now that the Common Core State Standards discourage what is call "frontloading," the practice of introducing students to an assigned reading by providing contextual information before those students have had a chance to grapple with it on their own. As Sheila McBride establishes in her thoughtful commentary on the recent debate over frontloading, this pedagogical strategy is second nature to those of us who teach in the humanities; but, as Shelia puts the point, "The consensus this past year is clear: most pre-teaching is out with the tide." Frontloading is, I realized, my usual practice: if I am teaching an essay by Susan Sontag, for example, I assign the essay and tell students a bit about Sontag, the role of public intellectuals at the time when she was writing, and her assumptions about the education level of her readers. In ways that I had not expected, the experience that the Fellows and I had at the YCBA made most of us feel more comfortable than we had been with the idea of dropping from our lesson plans the frontloading of information about context, the kind of information that might well offer our students interpretations that would limit, rather than increase, their understanding of a text.

The results of our experiment were, I think, genuinely remarkable – as they had been in 2011. Most of the Fellows looking at Wreckers, whether they knew its title and subject or not, focused on features like the ship in danger, the steam-boat in the darkest part of the canvas, and the castle-like structure towering unmoved during the storm. Yet in both cases most of the Fellows paid most attention to the human figures on the shore, people who, although they occupy the foreground of the painting, seem dwarfed by the drama being enacted on the sea and in the sky above them.

Turner, Wreckers, detail. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

After listing all the visual details that they saw in the painting, the two groups – one of them still without any information about the painting – began to offer interpretations of Wreckers, interpretations that turn traditional readings of this painting upside down. While one of the Fellows who knew what the people on the shore are doing remarked that they constitute an image of community, the group working with only what the painting itself said emphasized that point repeatedly and elaborated on it much more extensively than did their better-informed counterparts. What these Fellows saw – and here I am quoting the notes that April Higgins took – was a depiction of people doing "what they need to do to make it through the day," people "risking [their] lives," "working together, helping one another." This interpretation emphasizes the value of group effort, the coordinated straining of the people against the force of the sea, evident in the postures and groupings of the figures. In this reading the castle represents the forces that oppress workers like those on the shore: it is "pristine, untouched"; and this nameless, faceless image of power highlights, by contrast, the humanity of the people below it. The obvious moral evaluation offered by the title of the painting – that the wreckers depicted in it are criminals, if not murderers – was undermined by a positive reading of the coordinated, almost heroic, action taking place in the foreground of the painting.

This interpretation is highly original. When I asked an art historian how a Turner scholar reads Wreckers, the answer could not have been further than it was from the interpretation that the Fellows had developed: according to this expert, the painting is a "sublime" depiction of "the cruelty of man added to the cruelty of nature." Such a reading makes unquestionable sense, visualized, as it is, in the composition of Turner's painting, the forms of the people aligned in parallel with the form of the breaking waves, so that the human world and the natural world might seem to be comparable forces, collaborating with each other to cause pain and death. Yet the Fellows' reading of Wreckers enriches that idea, making it possible to see the painting as an ambiguous, rather than judgmental, statement about the extremes of human life, blending and contrasting light and dark as the tones of the painting do.

This kind of enriched understanding characterizes all the curriculum units that the Fellows in this seminar are presenting here. The variety of their topics and of their approaches is impressive, and the units span grade levels from kindergarten to high school; the subjects covered range from language arts and social studies to foreign languages. Yet all the units share the same goal: to widen students' perspectives by making a number of different connections, not only between word and image, but also between past and present, the foreign and the familiar, students' experience and that of other peoples. I have arranged the units in groups that emphasize the differences between perspectives that are historical and geographical and cultural, although the lines between these categories blur in obvious and, I think, productive ways. Readers of this introduction will also notice my repeated use of words that use vision as a metaphor for understanding – the noun perspective and the verb to see, in particular – and that use is not simply the inevitable stylistic outcome of the topic of this seminar, but a tribute to the numbers of ways in which the writers of these units ask their students to see subjects, phenomena, and even themselves in entirely new lights.

Many of the units present ways of linking past and present. The first unit published here is by Katie Adams, and it deserves this placement because she asks her students to write in pictures, after first showing them how the written forms of language emerged many millennia ago from the drawing of pictures. Katie sees as analogous the developmental level of most of her students and of the pre-historical peoples who first realized that images have the power to communicate from one human being to the next. This conjunction allows her to set forth a series of activities that encourage her students to see that they have capabilities that they have not recognized:

I want [my students] to understand that they are capable of being great writers by communicating their thoughts and ideas in drawing images and pictures, as people have been doing for thousands of years. My unit is designed not only to help students see themselves as writers, but also to feel comfortable and confident in their ability to communicate their thoughts in the developmentally appropriate practice of drawing pictures and images.

When even young students grasp the narrative potential of images, they can become writers without having to use words. April Higgins, a middle-school teacher, plans to teach the meaning of the social contract by having her students read the graphic novel The Girl Who Owned a City, written by Dan Jolley and illustrated by Joelle Jones and Jenn Manley Lee. Also using classic theories of the role of government by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, this unit sets the plot of the graphic novel, in which children are left alone in a world without adults, against the history of the increasing complexity of human social organizations from the family to the nation state. In her defense of graphic fiction, the teaching of which still tends to make parents and some teachers more than a bit nervous, April provides an argument to assuage their fears:

In reality, graphic texts are not just comic books with a new name: they are narratives, memoirs, historic fiction, and even nonfiction. Graphic novels today are written for readers of all ages and can be highly sophisticated. With a diversity of genres and writing styles, graphic novels can be used in the classroom to introduce or expand students' knowledge of a particular topic or theme.

Like Amanda Taggart, whose unit I describe below, April uses her unit to let us see how graphic texts can, in general, enrich what happens in the classroom and, in particular, make concrete an abstract concept like the social contract.

The next four units – by Kimberly Towne, Sara Delman, Patricia Kephart, and Sheila McBride – also use images to bring historical subjects alive. Kimberly, a middle-school art teacher, looks back to British culture in the Victorian period at a time when the awareness of the rights of animals developed in tandem with new ways of picturing animals. In her combination of art and literature and community service, Kimberly makes connections between distant times and both the present and the future contributions that her students could make to the welfare of others. She employs Victorian artistic depictions of animals by Edwin Landseer and Harrison Weir, along with Anna Sewell's novel Black Beauty, to pique her students' interest:

Children enjoy looking at art that shows animals and reading stories about animals. I believe this unit will provide the students with an engaging unit that teaches a larger concept by using examples that they will find appealing. Sixth-grade students are coming to middle school and are trying to figure where they fit and how to progress from being children to teenagers to ultimately adults. It is an awkward and confusing stage. I want this unit to influence the way they see the world and how they perceive the impact one person can make on that world. I want them by the end of the unit to feel that they can successfully make a difference, however small, in their world . . . .

Even farther afield than Victorian England, the Greece of the fifth-century BCE, when Sophocles wrote and presented his plays, is the subject of Sara Delman's unit, which she has prepared for her eleventh-grade AP English class. Sara recognizes a major difficulty that her students have when they read Oedipus Rex, and she plans to address it directly: her project asks her students to focus on the chorus precisely because they find that element of that tragedy so confusing and even irrelevant. Sara demonstrates how pictures drawn from a wide range of media – strange bedfellows that they are – can come together to make the historically foreign more familiar:

In this unit I'm attempting to teach the text Oedipus Rex by focusing mainly on the chorus and by teaching students about the incredibly important function of the chorus in classic Greek tragedy. We will use images of the Greek theatre as well as stills and clips from productions of Oedipus Rex to examine the role and function of the chorus in the tragedy. We will also compare and contrast the ancient Greek chorus with a modern equivalent: the Broadway musical.

As Sara says elsewhere in her unit, "Even my most chaotic after-lunch class can pay rapt attention as soon as there is a video or a picture up on my document camera"; and she therefore uses a time-honored practice from the discipline of art history by showing her students two images side-by-side so that they will have new ways to see what might otherwise seem a merely alien to their own experience.

Rounding out this group of units are two dealing with American history and presenting pedagogical approaches that can be adopted in both language-arts and social-studies classes. In her curricular plan, Sheila McBride uses paintings to help her middle-school students as they read Forge, a young-adult historical novel by Laurie Halse Anderson; and Patricia Kephart turns to picture books so that her fifth-grade students will recognize the significance of the contributions that women have made to the history of the United States. In addition to her commentary on the matter of frontloading, Sheila demonstrates how teachers can take advantage of the holdings in the Yale University Art Gallery, which include portraits of many of the historical figures depicted in Forge, who comprise, as she says, "Benedict Arnold, the Marquis de Lafayette, George and Martha Washington, Charles Willson Peale, and Baron von Steuben," along with lesser known people such as "Agrippa Hull – a free African American from Massachusetts; Oneida warriors; [James] Baumfree and [Elizabeth Baumfree or] Bett, parents of Sojourner Truth and slaves of a Colonel Johannes Hardenburgh." Most important in this unit is, as Sheila explains, the fact that its "images and assignments"

direct student thinking to the contradictions in early American history between our founding fathers' ideals – "All men are created equal" – and their tolerance of or active engagement in slave-owning. Students will learn that 5,000 African Americans fought in the American army, but many times that number fought for or joined the British side. The historical contradictions that underlie America's early history are central to this novel and this unit.

Patricia Kephart's project undertakes an equally significant re-visioning of the past when it proposes to add women's accomplishments to the customarily male-dominated realm of American history. Reading picture books will allow her students to make connections, not only between pictures and past lives, but also between those lives and the students' potential in the present and future:

Without pictures my street-smart city dwellers would be hard-pressed to imagine Stagecoach Mary Field's wild 1880s Montana. Equally unimaginable to them is Eleanor Roosevelt absorbing political knowhow as FDR's supportive wife among the elite of 1920s New York. Illustrations set the historic scene, color the emotions, and make the story accessible by bridging cultural, generational, and linguistic gaps. Women who made their mark on America encourage this generation to conquer their fears and follow their dreams.

Also like Sheila, Patricia has taken advantage of the fact that the Yale Gallery of Art has made available on line a wealth of visual images that anyone can download and share with students. Her unit offers an equally rich resource for teachers in its impressively extensive list of picture books and the criteria that she has developed for evaluating their effectiveness.

Through their innovative and quite different pedagogical methods, Crecia Cipriano and Matthew Kelly, from whose curriculum units I have already quoted, are planning both to teach foreign languages and to broaden the perspectives of their students in geographical and cultural terms. Crecia begins her unit, specifically designed for eighth-grade students in her French classes, by explaining how confused she felt as a tourist in Paris, and she builds on that experience to create ways in which to conquer her students' even greater unfamiliarity with that city: they will build personal maps of Paris that allow them to "choose locations to explore based on interest and curiosity rather than on top-ten lists of best-known, must-see spots." Using icons and images, Crecia's students will develop a sense of Paris as a knowable city – one likely, I think, to make them more committed to learning the language spoken there. Matthew, who teaches Spanish in high school, adds the perspective of history to those of culture and geography so that he can introduce his students to Spain and Mexico in the twentieth century. Matthew takes art objects and architecture as the visual texts of his project, helping his students to discover the significance of crucial periods in the histories of both countries, Spain under the rule of Franco and Mexico governed by Institutional Revolutionary Party. As he explains, the objects that he has chosen for analysis "are important because they are present in the lives of millions of citizens of Spain and Mexico. They provide a window on the Mexico and Spain of living memory, on political and social forces very much alive in these countries today." Particularly of interest in this unit is its demonstration of how a "dictatorial state" employs images to consolidate its power.

Finally, the curriculum units written by Julie So and Amanda Taggart help students learn about phenomena and circumstances unlike their own, with Julie introducing her northern-California kindergarteners to the kind of weather that they have never experienced (think snow) and Amanda Targgart broadening the cultural perspectives of her ninth- and tenth-grade students in her English classes by asking them to read Marjane Satrapi's memoir-graphic-novel Persepolis. Julie has developed a wide variety of ways to use the subject of weather to interest and, I predict, delight her students: at times the class becomes an art studio; at other, a science lab. Because her students are second-language learners, as Julie says, they need to build the prior knowledge that they are expected to have but often lack, yet they have ample capabilities to be successful learners:

Amusingly to me, young children, with their curious eyes, hands, and bodies, seek to understand the world around them, and they are naturally intrigued by science. This is one of the reasons why I can't wait to introduce a unit that will focus mainly on science standards, using strategies to connect images and words for deeper comprehension of weather and how it affects the world and earth's inhabitants.

Amanda Targgart plans to address a comparable lack, this one in her high-school students' knowledge and understanding of the history and culture of the Middle East; and she uses a visual metaphor in her subtitle to signal that she would like students to see with something other than their standard "American Lens." In a fashion befitting the concluding unit in this seminar, Amanda Targgart's remarks on what she plans to accomplish in her project provide a comprehensive account of the value of focusing on the relation between word and image:

Visual literacy must be explored in the English class curriculum in order to prepare students for our visual world. In addition, to be prepared for the global world, students must have an understanding of cultures from outside the United States. By reading the graphic-novel-memoir Persepolis, other supplementary texts, and by seeing photographs and videos, students will learn about Iranian history and culture. Furthermore, they will take ownership in the development of their visual and verbal literacy . . . .

The subject of visual literacy has entered the English class as well as many others; and a wide range of teachers will want, I think, to take advantage of the thoughtful, resourceful, and inventive approaches to their subjects that these curriculum units set forth.

As a collection of pedagogical strategies and of viewpoints on important theoretical issues, these units are remarkable, as I have said, because they all share similar goals. Each of the Fellows in this seminar sees that the interplay of words and images has the potential to empower his or her students – to make it possible for them to think, for instance, that their commitment to social action really could make a difference or that they too might have a significant role to play in the life of our nation. More generally, the enriching perspectives of these curriculum units offer a wide variety of opportunities to the students lucky enough to be taught by their authors to be empowered as thinkers. That is, I would argue, the goal of the best of instructors, and I am grateful to have had a chance to work this summer with the genuinely exceptional teachers whose units are featured here.

Janice Carlisle

The Fellows in this seminar shared a lively and productive interest in the "So what?" of teaching. Why am I doing this? What do I expect my students to learn? How can I get them to think harder about what they read?—or, in any case, how can I get them doing what Bloom's Taxonomy calls "higher-order thinking"? In the seminar, we began by working with very small or very elementary texts, having outlined some interpretive approaches to texts in general that have appealed to critics. We then settled into the interpretation of more challenging texts that involve what might be called an interpretive crux: for example, Tennyson's "Ulysses," James's The Turn of the Screw, and Shakespeare's Hamlet. We returned in the end (much to my enjoyment, at least!) to a group of poems by Robert Frost.

For their curriculum units the Fellows arrived in New Haven for the most part knowing which texts – mandated or allowed by their school districts – they wanted to teach, so it remained only to decide how to teach them. As nearly always in our seminars, the Fellows' interests fell spontaneously into clusters, and it's in the order of these clusters – four of them – that I want to present the units here. There are of course overlaps of interest that might prompt another arrangement, but these are the clearest linkages. First, there are two units, to my extreme but happy surprise, on Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Second, there are three units that involve the teaching of Native American culture. Third, there are three units that have as their main purpose the encouragement of spiritual and social understanding, if not activism. And fourth, there are three units that bring interpretive strategies to bear on a single age-specific text.

Ludy Aguada offers a unit on Heart of Darkness best suited for AP students that focuses interpretive skills on the text but also extensively engages with secondary materials (her base text is the Norton edition), focused on Chinua Achebe's provocation and the most thoughtful responses to it in the ensuing controversy. Jo Stafford's unit on Heart of Darkness takes a similar painstaking approach with the help of secondary material, but with a special emphasis on the theme of evil and its implications.

LeAndrea James from the Diné Nation teaches special education students in her school district with the hope of igniting in them an interest in the Navajo language and their culture. To this end, she assigns poems for children based on the seasons and concerning traditional practices that are illustrated and written in both English and Navajo. Alexandra Edwards is a history teacher using fictional and semi-fictional texts to illuminate the historical circumstances surrounding outsiders attempting to secure and maintain landed property in the United States: Black families during Jim Crow (Mildred Taylor), immigrants in the Midwest (Cather's My Antonia), the Lakota Sioux and also the Navajo after the Long Walk (various texts). Christen Schumacher fulfills a State of Virginia mandate for second or third graders by covering concepts of cultural difference and change through time with the comparison and contrast of Native American cultures from the Southwest, the Great Plains, and the Northeast, using illustrated books of fact and fiction for young children.

E. M. Miller encourages the appreciative understanding of her city, Chicago, and the urban in general, by "starting small" with a children's book about a transplanted house (gendered female) and ending small with haiku poems written in Paris by Richard Wright, ranging through Sandburg and other Chicagoans in between while invoking strong pedagogical mentors. Jeff Weathers writes an exhortation about making connections, reviewing advanced theories of interpretation and cognition with a pedagogical slant while proposing to teach – and in the meantime offering insight on – disparate texts addressing, first, the notion of being an "It," and second, the horror of Jim Crow violence. William (Miles) Greene offers a unit on the protest poem, providing some background for this mode, with an emphasis on three interpretive objectives: the author's purpose, the tone, and the poem's mood.

Leilani Esguerra sharpens her students' interpretive skills by approaching a single mandated text, Jon Krakauer's semi-fictional Into the Wild, with an emphasis on the narrator's reliability, partly introduced through a contrast with relatives' descriptions of the character described. Her particular focus questions whether the chapter epigraphs confirm or conflict with the chapters' content. Cheree Charmello teaches S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders in a unique way: Offering a full survey of the literature on improvisation ("Improv"), she explains how to teach the book by inducing students to "perform" each chapter successively in keeping with the many situations that are standard in Improv, one for each chapter. Whitney Davis, finally, engages the interpretive attention of very young students by walking them through the chapters of Roald Dahl's The BFG, covertly introducing both folkloric history and the concept of literary allusion by cross-referring to other books about giants, Jack in the Beanstalk (alluded to by Dahl) and Fin M'Coul.

I would encourage all interested teachers to read these provocative and helpful curriculum units.

Paul H. Fry

This seminar, intended chiefly for teachers of reading, writing, social studies, history, and English, sought to encourage the use of biography (including autobiography) as a method of classroom instruction. Everyone has a life worth recalling, even if only to one's family or to one's self: learning itself, if by that we mean accumulated experience, is arguably the most important use of biography. Maybe that's why biographies, whether in print or electronic editions, continue to be so widely read.

How, though, do you go about writing a life, whether it's your own or someone else's? Because I've been working on a biography myself – of the 20th century American diplomat and strategist George F. Kennan – I've tried over the past decade and a half to learn something about the subject by teaching it to Yale undergraduates. I adapted the course for the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute in 2012 and, in the summer of 2013, for the Yale National Initiative. My teachers and I concentrated on several things:

First, the reading and critical discussion of biographies and autobiographies, selected with the help of the seminar to reflect a range of subjects and approaches. I wanted the list to include both good and not-so-good biographies, because I think you can learn at least as much from each. I wanted the emphasis to be as much literary as historical, because biography – which is really about character – relies as much on the skills of novelists as of historians. And I wanted to explore particular genres of biography, ranging from the first great autobiography (St. Augustine's Confessions) through graphic biography, a recent innovation in the field (Chester Brown's life of Louis Riel).

Second, extending the concept of biography from the printed page to the new media that will – as costs come down – surely be making their way into classrooms. Yale's Collaborative Learning Center provided each of my teachers with iPads for the two weeks they were in New Haven, and we experimented with their use both inside and outside the seminar. Particularly valuable to us was Art Authority, a pre-loaded app that allowed us all instant access to thousands of portraits and landscapes, each suggesting something (usually multiple things) about biography.

Third, extracting from these readings and visual materials certain principles of biography that can, with appropriate adaptation, be "teachable" across a wide range of age groups and student skill levels. I was fortunate to have teachers working across a broad range of grade levels and student needs. Without the years of experience my teachers brought to our seminar, we would hardly have been able to connect principles with practice as thoroughly as we did.

Finally, based on the readings they'd done, the iPads they'd experimented with, and the principles they'd identified, each of the teachers in my seminar produced a curriculum unit for use in their own classrooms and we hope in others, meant to engage students in the reading and writing of biographies or autobiographies. These reflect several different approaches:

The use of autobiographies focusing on the experiences of childhood and adolescence. Carol Boynton's unit, designed for first through fourth graders, introduces her students to the idea of autobiography through the stories of two prominent children's authors, Patricia Polacco and Tomie dePaola. Taylor Davis employs a similar approach in a unit intended for sixth through eighth graders, based on the boyhood memoirs of the author Roald Dahl. Working with the same age group, Michelle Hilbeck explores the issue of bullying in school through the autography of Dan Greenburg. And Raymond Smith, who also teaches middle schoolers, concentrates on the negative lessons to be learned from the troubled adolescence of the author Jack Gantos. From these examples, their students will be able to compose, illustrate, and circulate their own autobiographies, in each case emphasizing, as do Polacco, dePaola, Dahl, Greenberg and Gantos, specific character-shaping episodes, some to be emulated, some to be avoided, drawn from the experiences of others roughly the students' own age.

Autobiographies and biographies documenting the lives of individuals within distinctive groups. Role models are important, especially within "minority" communities, a point stressed by several teachers in this year's seminar. Torrieann Dooley introduces her second graders to this idea by way of a Dr. Seuss story, after which her students will read age-accessible biographies of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Lisa Christenson's fifth graders will study African-Americans during the American Revolution, and then write about what they themselves might have experienced if they had they lived in that time and place. Terry Anne Wildman is teaching a similar unit on fugitive slave narratives before and during the American Civil War. Audrelia Dugi, a high school teacher in a Navajo school, is emphasize the lives of notable Navajos as a way of training her students in appropriate techniques for interviewing members of their own families about their history, which in their culture is rarely if ever written down.

Using the life of a single individual to teach principles of autobiography and biography. Camille Pires will put her third graders through a detailed analysis of Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father, letting them discover for themselves what it takes to write an autobiography. Audra Bull's middle-schoolers are particularly interested in Walt Disney, so she has made herself an expert on his life as a way of encouraging them to try their own hand at drawing, but also to show them how a biography is constructed. Sonia Henze, who teaches women's studies to high school students, undertakes a similar project, with parallel purposes, on the life of Gloria Steinem. Finally, Liz Daniell, who teaches English to high school students, takes advantage of the recent discovery of the remains of King Richard III to teach Shakespeare's eponymous play, stressing the extent to which the Bard, like many biographers, had an interest in blackening his subject's reputation: her students will learn, from this unusually dramatic case, the importance of reading biography critically.

I've learned a lot from working with these dedicated teachers, and all of us hope the curriculum units they've prepared will be helpful to others. I'm grateful as well to the equally dedicated staff of the Yale National Institute, and to my seminar coordinator Carol Boynton, for having made our collaboration possible.

John Lewis Gaddis

Deriving its title from the novel of the same name by Italo Calvino, the Invisible Cities seminar investigated relationships among the cities, neighborhoods, and communities that artists have reimagined by their creations. We aimed to find teachable strategies for discovering the amazing in the commonplace wherever students live and learn. To accomplish this, we developed a method of perceiving and interpreting the urban environment. Our method foregrounds the value of what cannot be seen until it has been imagined. Called an "ambient poetics," this method depends on the curricular arts—fine, performing, and literary—for its inspiration, and on careful observation for its realization. We defined "cities" as constructed physical and social spaces (not all of them densely urban) organized by human activity and imagination into special places. Guided by Calvino, we numbered among them cities that once were there but now are gone, cities that will be there in the future but that exist only as plans, cities that live only in dreams and never will be, and cities that are hiding in plain sight all around us. Such cities will likely remain unseen until art and artists—better still, the art and artists that students will find in themselves—make them visible.

Krista Waldron, a YNI Fellow who teaches at Phoenix Rising, a school for adjudicated youths in North Tulsa, Oklahoma, summed up our approach in the Rationale section of her unit, "The Study of a Zip Code: Tulsa's Invisible City." For its accuracy as well as its eloquence, the passage merits citation in full by way of introduction:

The anchor text for our Invisible Cities seminar has been Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. In it, during long conversations between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, Polo tells story upon story about cities he has encountered in his travels. Or perhaps they are in his head. Or maybe they are simply dozens of manifestations of Venice. This distinction is irrelevant. It is the cumulative effect of all those ambient impressions that caused me to think about our rich and varied relationships with our cities. I found these ideas to be connected to my unit and to some unspoken thoughts I had been harboring about it. Some of these cities are defined by their residents, some by what is there or not there. Others are identified by the perceptions of visitors or the imagination of Marco Polo. Nothing is clear or certain in the narrative except that cities are complex places, and that we have deep, emotional connections to them through experience, memories, symbols, and history. Our relationships with our cities define who we are by how they capture our imagination and how they reflect what we love, hate and fear.

Leading her students first to conceive Mind Maps of North Tulsa, she will conclude with Heart Maps—the graphic representations by her students of the beauty they find in their neighborhood that they might have neglected and others might not be able to see at all.

To see these places Krista's students don't need to know exactly what they're looking for, but they do have to know how to look. That means keeping in mind that the first thing to look for is what they can't see at first sight. The practice of an ambient poetics is based on observation and participation, even (or especially) if the activity is as simple as taking a walk in the city. Always on the alert to catch a lucky glimpse of the unseen, practitioners recognize two overlapping phases of experience—perception and interpretation—organized into eight modes of inquiry. The perceptual modes are optics (what do they see? and what don't they see?) sonics (what do they hear? and what don't they hear?), and mnemonics (what do they know and what don't they know?). In this perceptual phase, it is also useful to take any opportunity to engage the other senses as well: tactile, kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory. The interpretive modes correspond to different kinds of human performance or given-to-be-seen behaviors: kinesics (movements); proxemics (groupings); histrionics (interactions), architectonics (the built environment, divided into paths, nodes, landmarks, borders, and compelling destinations), and forensics (the social consequences of the above, and their likely causes). The effective practice of an ambient poetics does not require practitioners to use all of this terminology, or even any of it; what it does require is a willingness to imagine what they know, feel what they perceive, and interrogate what they learn.

The seminar got started by reading an essay by Margaret Olin on the eruv, which is a special boundary around a neighborhood that allows the observant Jews who live within it to engage in activities that they would not otherwise be able to do on the Sabbath. These include carrying physical objects like house keys and pushing baby carriages from place to place through the streets. The symbolic perimeter of an eruv, which is typically marked by a continuous strand of monofilament line, turns all the houses in the neighborhood it encloses into a single home, within which such efforts are permitted even on the day of mandated rest. In a passage typical of Invisible Cities but especially applicable to the interpretation of the eruv, Calvino vivifies the imaginative process of seeing the invisible. Marco Polo recounts the distinctive character of "Ersilia," one of the fifty five magical cities on his itinerary:

In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city's life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave; the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain. (p. 76)

Blood, trade, authority, and agency sum up as well as any four words can the many kinds of behavior-tracing "strings" that we found woven into the fabrics the cities we perceived and interpreted by our method. But the strands of meaning we sought were actual as well as imaginary.

The entire Yale campus is encircled by an eruv, and at our first meeting together in May, the seminar Fellows and their Leader took a walking tour to see if we could find it. The boundary marker itself, a fishing line strung from telephone pole to telephone pole, is all but invisible to observers until they actively search it out by finding the perfect angle in the right light. Andrea Krulas, English teacher at Roberto Clemente Community Academy in Chicago and alumna of the Film Studies program at Northwestern University, spotted it first. The author of "Paseo Boricua: Discovering Our Own Division," her unit on the Puerto Rican neighborhood surrounding her school, Andrea, with an eye for art, was able to guide our eyes so that eventually the rest of us saw it too. And once we saw it, we could not un-see it; nor could we see Yale or the city of New Haven again in quite the same way. Under the aegis of an ambient poetics, having made the invisible visible, we turned the oft-unremarked space through which we walked every day into a remarkable place.

Waltrina Kirkland-Mullins needed no prompting to agree that New Haven is remarkable, even where it is hardest for some to see. Pointing out that many of her students at the Davis Street Arts and Academics Interdistrict Magnet School have very limited knowledge of the historic New Haven Green—some have never been there even though they live within shouting distance of it—she designed "Whence We Stand: A Visual Geography/History Adventure" for her 3 ^rd graders. Invisible until it is pointed out, the architectural detailing of the metalwork around the Green reflects its origins in West African forms. Waltrina's title plays on the familiarity of the phrase "Where We Stand," substituting the word whence, which suggests arrival from another time, to convey dynamic movement forward. With the cooperation of the New Haven Museum, her students will study the site of every building around the Green, which was first laid out in 1638, with an eye to what occupied the address before, what occupies it now, and what might occupy it in the future. Sometimes in order to see our way forward, however, the first thing to do is to look down. In "Travel Stories: Mapping the Vision, Walking the Journey," Gloria Brinkman is drawing the attention of her North Mecklenburg High School art students to their feet. Respecting the importance that they attach to their shoes, known to them as "kicks," she calls on them to use multi-media art projects to tell their stories of travel, whether along the transnational paths of migration that brought so many of them to Charlotte, North Carolina, or the pedestrian paths of habit and desire that lead them to walk in patterned directions every day, telling a story with their footsteps.

From day to day in the intensive session, our seminar discussions centered on four case studies, each honoring the unique circumstances of a specific situation in a school district that participates in the Yale National Initiative: 1) "Forking Time": downtown redevelopment in Richmond, Virginia and the expansion of the VCU School of the Arts; 2) "Division Street, Chicago": Boundary Performance in the City on the Make; 3) "Polk Street Stories": GLBT oral history and "The Poetic City that Was," San Francisco, California; and 4) tradition and innovation in the arts of the Diné Nation, from sand painting ("places where the gods come and go") to the Black Sheep Art Collective. The method of an ambient poetics, however, is applicable to any city. To illustrate that point, we began by reading three units from "The Big Easy: Literary New Orleans and Intangible Heritage," a seminar from YNI 2011: Shanedra Nowell, "The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot and its Legacy: Experiencing Place as Text"; Marilyn Dempsey, "The Intangible Heritage of the Diné"; Barbara Prillaman, "The Responsibility is Ours: Preserving Intangible Heritage"; accessed at

http://teachers.yale.edu/curriculum/units/2011/4/

We continued with three literary accounts of invisible cities on our (imaginary) walking tours: Nelson Algren's Chicago: City on the Make (1951; Anniversary Edition, 2011); Lawrence Ferlinghetti's San Francisco Poems (2003); and Diné poet Luci Tapahonso's Blue Horses Rush In (1997), supplemented by theoretical writings by Michel de Certeau, "Walking in the City," from The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) and Erving Goffman's "Regions and Region Behavior," from The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). We also accessed the web resources cited below and many others. Sidney Coffin, for example, builds his course materials entirely from web-based poetry, written and spoken, in "Invisible Migrations: The Journey from Spanish to English and Back Again Through Performance Poetry" for Edison/Fareira High School in Philadelphia.

Mindful of the importance of the forensic mode of our ambient poetics, we noted how the arts have tended to take the lead in the creative transformation of living spaces for diverse peoples—revitalizing moribund communities through the magnetic draw of cultural attractions, sustaining tradition through historic preservation, and promoting local identity through art centers and educational outreach; but also bringing about (un)intended consequences, such as socioeconomic displacement through "gentrification." Our goal in part was to imagine the utopian possibilities of balancing arts-driven development with community diversity, sustainability, and vitality. In that spirit, Benjamin Barnett-Perry's unit, "People with Disabilities: An Invisible Community," takes up the cause of Universal Design, a strategy of maximum architectural accommodation for all, exemplified in practice by the Ed Roberts Campus at UC-Berkeley, which is nearby Oceana High School, where Ben tutors students with special needs. Applying the logic of the late disability activist Ed Roberts to students classified with various learning disabilities, he asks them: "What, for you, is a curb?" His unit records the fact that the first "cut curb," now familiar nationwide as an accommodation to the differently mobile, was installed along Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley— a humbly (in)visible local monument to the grand arc of a universe that bends toward justice.

In fact, the Fellows in the Invisible Cities seminar discovered that they had already done much of the preliminary research for their curriculum units by living where they do. For some time now they have been learning and teaching the physical and mental nodal points, marked and unmarked, in networks of local meaning that already abound in memory and imagination. Barbara Prillaman, of Delaware's Conrad Schools of Science, discovered the inspiration for "Appetizers, Main Courses, and Desserts: A Menu of Sociological Research Methods" in the signature dishes of her favorite local restaurant. Culinary arts are arts indeed, and food ways render otherwise opaque folk ways highly transparent. We are not only what we eat, she argues, but also how we eat. The continuing influence of "The Big Easy" seminar from YNI 2011 is gratifyingly evident in Barbara's "Menu."

In the writing of such curriculum units, however, God (or the Devil) is in the details. The somewhat awkward phrase "forking time," for instance, comes from architect Steven Holl's programmatic description for the VCU Institute for Contemporary Art in Richmond. "The idea of 'forking time,'" he writes, "suggests that in the world of contemporary art there may be many parallel times. The notion of ongoing time and its 'grand narrative' are questioned." In a place where the memory of the Civil War is performed by outsized equestrian statues of Confederate generals lining Monument Boulevard, grand narratives are ripe for questioning. Evoking his plan for the Institute building's divergent ("forked") wings, which quote ironically the street plan of the historic "Fan District" beyond it, Holl proffers his landmark design to a deeply traditional city that is in the process, led by the arts, of postmodern reinvention. Even before ground for the Institute for Contemporary Art has been broken, however, time has forked again. Two miles downtown from the Institute site, which at this writing is still a (frequently robbed) gas station, lie the partially excavated foundations of the Lumpkin Jail, once the place where enslaved people were held captive until they were auctioned off in Richmond's thriving slave market. In the parking lot adjacent to this site, partially overshadowed by Interstate 95, the weathered shell of the "Winfree Cottage" rests on a temporary scaffold of rusting steel beams. Saved from demolition at the last moment four years ago, the Winfree Cottage is thought to be the only surviving structure in Richmond that was once owned by a slave, who inherited it from her master (who was also her husband). This is precisely the kind of history—the disavowed sharp end of "forking time"—that the one-time Capital of the Confederacy doesn't quite know what to do with, except to park it haphazardly somewhere like a trailer. But the Winfree Cottage is also now the centerpiece of Valerie Schwartz's YNI curriculum unit, "Invisible Richmond: The History Behind the Urban Landscape," which develops the contrast between history, which is cognitively grasped, and memory, which is personally felt by her 4 ^th graders in their language arts and required Virginia Studies curricula at Richmond's Mary Munford Elementary School.

The fact is that even structures that have not escaped demolition persist in memory. They stick in the mind's eye with poignancy undiminished (or even intensified) by their disappearance. As in Calvino's Ersilia, the "strings" of living memory defy the abandonment and even the dismantling of the buildings they once entwined. Sarah Weidmann teaches language arts and social studies at National Teachers Academy in Chicago. She knows at first hand that in public housing, as in public education, Chicago is a city on the un-make (pace Algren). Sarah's school looks out on the fields of rubble that until 2010 were the Ickes Family Homes, in whose name the original neighborhood of tenements was likewise bulldozed in the 1950s. By taking oral testimony from the survivors, she has reconstructed their stories for re-enactment by her middle-school students in "Vacant Lot: The Chicago Ickes Community Remembered." She has found answers to the forensic question that frames her unit: "Where does a place go that is no longer there?"

Yet of other invisible cities, neither living memory nor even the ruin remains. Sara Stillman's "Discovering the Invisible Bay Street: Uncovering Emeryville's History and Understanding Our Own" mentally and emotionally excavates the many-layered site of the Bay Street Mall. "The Mall" (for her students, there is no other) rises over the apocalyptically polluted remains of an industrial-era paint factory, which rests on the site of a Gold Rush dance hall, which once crowned the debris of an Ohlone Indian shell mound and burial site dating back millennia. No living informants speak of this buried city, but its address is at the intersection of Ohlone and Shell Mound, a crossing of Calvino-esque "strings" that Sara's students at the Emery Secondary School will be able to see when, using her method of Art Based Research on the street signs they pass by every day, they catch them in the best light at the right angle.

The Diné (Navajo) artists of the Black Sheep Art Collective have carved for Italo Calvino a special niche of critical admiration. Balancing tradition and innovation in the face of assimilationist pressures, as Native Americans have done for centuries, these painters and sculptors, like the novelist, know how to render invisibility in several dimensions. They follow the patterns made by the strings that wind their way through the byways of Navajo life. At first glance, the Diné Nation is not a city. But reading thousands of years of inscriptions etched on the rocks of the sacred canyons by the Holy People, the beholder learns otherwise. Some 300,000 petraglyphs by Puebloan artists have been identified across the canyon region, a mere fraction of the likely total. Diné Nation is therefore in fact a very old city, the oldest one in North America, already ancient when New Haven was founded in 1638. Precisely capturing the emotional tangibility of the traces marked only by slender lines, Calvino writes: "Thus, when traveling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form" (p. 76). Marilyn Dempsey, of Tséhootsooí Diné Bi'olta, Window Rock Unified School District, Arizona, inspired our seminar with her accounts of the intricate relationships of Navajo life and culture—blood, trade, authority, agency, and so much more. In the example her curriculum unit for the traditional Navajo language school in Window Rock, only a small fraction of which can ever be written down, all of our other invisible cities seek their aspirational form.

References:

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972; Harcourt Brace & Co., 1974)

Margaret Olin "The Poetics of the Eruv" Images 5.1 (2011): 3-13

http://www.christianmarcschmidt.com/invisiblecities/

http://www.archdaily.com/229760/steven-holl-architects-unveils-vcu-institute-for-cotemporary-art-at-meulensteen-gallery/

http://www.paseoboricua.com/

http://hearingvoices.com/news/2012/01/hv099-polk-street-stories/

https://sites.google.com/site/blacksheepartist/

Joseph R. Roach

With concerns about the impact on the environment of our current use of fossil fuels and our national energy security, energy is in the news on a daily basis. Many students have seen Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" and are familiar with some of the issues relating to energy use, but they may not know much about the science related to energy. The aim for this seminar was to discuss the science related to current sources of energy and potential future sources of energy. We can learn much about sustainable energy use by studying natural processes. Nature has solved the renewable energy problem through the process of photosynthesis that is carried out by green plants. Plants are amazing chemical factories and provide a working example of renewable solar energy conversion, but this is often not appreciated. By understanding how plants carry out the processes of solar energy utilization, we can obtain some answers to the question of how we can harvest solar energy by using processes of artificial photosynthesis.

My own interest in science stems from my hands-on experiences as a child. Therefore, many demonstrations were included in this seminar – at least one demonstration, and frequently 2-3, in each seminar meeting. These demonstrations were chosen so that they could actively involve the students and at the same time illustrate the scientific principles related to energy.

The books by David Walker entitled "Energy, Plants and Man" and by David J. C. MacKay entitled "Sustainable Energy – without the hot air" were used as the primary technical books for the seminar. We also read Daniel Yergin's "The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World", a fascinating but not highly technical analysis of our current energy use. The beginning of the seminar focused on energy, light and photosynthesis. The seminar began with a discussion of how plants use light to convert carbon dioxide and water into sugar and oxygen gas. This included discussions on the nature of light and the fundamental steps by which light is absorbed by plants and converted into chemical energy. Demonstrations of the colors in light using diffractions glasses aided these discussions. A connection was made between natural photosynthesis and the excess production of biomass that has been buried to form the "fossil fuels" that provide most of our current energy. Next, we delved into various forms of energy, including hydroelectric, biofuels, wind, geothermal, solar and nuclear. A highlight of the seminar was the production of biodiesel fuel from cooking oil that culminated in the combustion of biodiesel fuel in an oil furnace burner. The seminar also included a discussion of energy use in the future that included progress in development of systems for artificial photosynthesis and fuel cells.

The curriculum units developed from this seminar are suitable for elementary to middle school to high school students. In all of the units, the science content is integrated with language arts, mathematics and social studies to provide a balanced program that meets the literacy requirements of the school system. The Fellows have prepared extensive lists of materials that can be used in the classroom or as resources. These materials include books that the students can read, textbooks that the teachers can use, demonstration sourcebooks, suppliers of equipment and many addresses of sites on the world wide web. Several of the Fellows developed units around a theme or activity related to future sources of energy, including an innovative Physics unit on the prospects for the use of fusion as a unlimited source of energy in the future. Other units are related to comparisons of current sources of energy based on fossil fuels with the renewable energy sources such as biofuels. Information on the responsible use of current sources of energy to lower our carbon footprint, as well as the impact of our energy use on the planet Earth, is also provided in many of the curriculum units. The units include a number of excellent activities that will engage the students' interest and teach them about energy sciences.

I would encourage all teachers of elementary through high school students to review these curriculum units. These materials provide a valuable resource for incorporating topics of science and society related to "Energy Sciences" into the classroom.

Gary W. Brudvig

DNA is worthy of this glamour. Nucleic acids are the key information storage molecules of life. Genetic information is encoded within the nucleic acids of almost every cell in our body, where it is capable of being inherited from one cell to the next, generation after generation. The study of nucleic acids is multifaceted: it involves examination of the structure and function of nucleic acid polymers, the capacity of these molecules to hold information, the changes in information content that happen upon modifications of nucleic acids, the diverse roles of nucleic acids in the life of a cell, and the characteristics that make them useful tools in biotechnology and bioengineering. DNA is also intimately involved in human health. Many diseases result from failures at the DNA level. These failures can arise from defects in genes themselves (causing genetic diseases) or in the regulatory regions of genes (causing cancer). Some diseases are the result of a defect in a single gene. Although many of these diseases are rare, some—such as cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy—are relatively common. Many scientists and engineers are now involved in the search for safe and effective methods for gene therapy in humans, in the hope that the defective genes can be replaced with new functional genes, which will cure the disease.

From the origins of recombinant DNA technology in the 1970s, our society has quickly gained the capability to manipulate and use DNA as a tool for understanding and treating disease. DNA technology has also changed the way that we manufacture drugs. Human genes can now be inserted safely and efficiently into bacteria, yeast, viruses, or animal cells. This capability has already led to the production of recombinant proteins as therapeutic drugs; diabetics around the world now use recombinant human insulin that is safer and cheaper than previous insulin drugs, which were harvested from animal tissues. DNA technology is also changing forensic science, agriculture, and other aspects of contemporary life. Some bioengineers are even learning how to use DNA as a tool, deploying DNA molecules as molecular Tinker Toys for building tiny but well-defined objects.

This seminar examined nucleic acids, beginning with an introduction to the science of genetics and ending with descriptions of some of the ways that DNA is now used in human health. Along the path from genetics to bioengineering, the seminar focused on the structure of nucleic acids and the basic concepts underlying molecular biology. The seminar also made excursions into the field of biotechnology, which harnesses what we know about DNA to manufacture new medicines, to improve foods, and to treat diseases where medicines fail. The curriculum units that were produced in this seminar should be of interest to teachers in science, mathematics, and health. In addition, because there is so much material now written about the science of DNA and its impact on society, this seminar may be of interest to teachers interested in how students can read for information.

Specifically, the seminar covered the following topics:

1. Introduction to molecular biology
2. Introduction to genetic engineering
3. Tools of genetic engineering: host cells and vectors
4. Medical applications of gene manipulation
5. Forensic applications of genetics
6. Genes and genomes (with a visit to Yale's West Campus, Genome Analysis Center)
7. Polymerase chain reaction
8. Transgenic plants and animals

The discussions in the seminar were enhanced by our reading from: Introduction to Genetic Engineering, Third Edition, D.S.T. Nicholl, Cambridge University Press (2008); and Biomedical Engineering, W. Mark Saltzman, Cambridge University Press (2009).

The Fellows prepared curriculum units that covered a breadth of information on genes and genetic engineering. The material presented in the units assembled in this volume span an impressive range and are designed for use in classrooms from elementary through high school.

Many of the units focused on material that is appropriate for high school students. Amanda Issa wrote a unit called "Genetically Engineering Cures for Single Gene Diseases," which provides a sound review of the principles of modern gene therapy, focused on four diseases that result from single gene defects: Huntington's disease, sickle cell anemia, hemophilia, and cystic fibrosis. Her unit provides a description of the genetic basis of each of these diseases, as well as descriptions of how changes in the gene affect the physiology of individuals. Further, she challenges students to think about new approaches for correcting or reversing the genetic defects. Vanessa Vitug produced a unit titled "DNA in Forensic Science," which she uses to present information on the molecular biology in the context of forensic science. The unit covers a range of important and timely topics, including DNA fingerprinting and role of polymerase chain reaction (or PCR) in crime scene analysis. Timothy Spence prepared a unit titled "HIV: From Horror to Hope." His unit, designed for high school mathematics and biology teachers, describes the early history of the AIDS epidemic and the unraveling of the mystery of its cause, through discovery of the structure and genetic characteristics of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Importantly, he describes how the special properties of that virus make it one of the most promising vehicles for treating genetic diseases. Timothy also provides examples of how mathematics teachers can use genetic principles as the basis of real-world applications of statistics and mathematics.

Three of the units in this volume focus on the use of DNA in agriculture and, in particular, on important issues surrounding genetically-modified foods. Two of the units are prepared for high school classrooms. Maria Orton's unit, called "Effects of Genetically Modified Organisms on Agriculture," approaches the topic from the point of view of chemistry, examining the differences that result in agricultural products as a result of genetic modifications. By presenting a topic that is important to every student and parent—how safe is the food that you eat?—the unit provides a practical example of the relevance of chemistry in all of our lives. Stuart Surrey wrote a unit called "Controversial Issues Regarding the Consumption of Genetically Modified Crops" which focuses on both the means of production of genetically modified foods and the history of their development. Laura Kessinger explores many of the same themes in her unit, "The Evolution of Genetic Engineering." Laura's unit was designed for elementary school students, but should also to appropriate for many middle school classrooms, as well. Importantly, in each of these units, Stuart and Maria and Laura provide scientific material that allows teachers and students to explore the pros and cons of genetic engineering in agriculture.

Laura Carroll-Koch prepared a unit called "Harnessing the Power of DNA," which was designed for elementary school teachers and students. Her unit provides a description of the basic science of DNA and molecular biology, including a presentation of ways to use this information to treat diseases that have proven very difficult to treat. Laura also brings to the foreground a theme that is present in all of the units in this volume: teachers can generate excitement in their classrooms by exposing their students to new concepts in genetics and genetic engineering, with the hope that many young people will be inspired to careers in science, to help realize the potential for science and engineering to improve the lives of the world population.

Mark Saltzman