Objectives
Alameda Middle School is an impoverished, 100% free breakfast, free lunch middle school lying in the heart of a multigenerational barrio in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The population is 98% Hispanic, with a few handfuls of Native American and Anglo students as well. We have been "looping" at Alameda for the past four years; thus, a team of seventh grade teachers will teach their same students when they are in eighth grade. It has been amazingly successful in providing a coherent, smooth approach to curriculum, and it established a close two year bond between the staff and students. I find looping to be especially relevant and exciting in light of my current Yale curriculum unit, War of the Worlds-Multimedia Adaptations. I am privileged to be a participant in Dr. Dudley Andrew's film seminar for the second year, and looping allows me the freedom to fashion a curriculum which builds upon the film essentials my students learned last fall when I taught last year's Yale unit on Oral Tradition and Memory in African Film. It developed into a highlight for my entire school. Continuing the scope and sequence of teaching through the medium of film is a most important objective of mine again for this coming fall.
Film as an instructional genre fits well into my full-inclusion, differentiated-instruction classroom sessions. The promise that many of my special needs students hold truly blossoms when they are afforded a new learning tool and a creative means for assessing what they've learned. My current unit will look at H. G. Wells' famous 1898 text, The War of the Worlds, and the societal times during which it was written. We will listen to the 1938 Halloween Eve radio broadcast of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre adaptation of the text which managed to petrify the nation. Students will be the judges of how the political times in America set the scene for their gullibility. Two very different cinematic versions of The War of the Worlds were released in 1953 and 1996. We'll view them in their entirety. A fourth medium, periodicals, will allow students to read journalistic reports of the fallout from the radio broadcast and reviews of the book, the broadcast, and the two movies.
All necessary background research will be included in this unit for you, my teaching colleagues. An annotated book bibliography will aid in your selecting which texts you may want to peruse. All are easily obtained, and I also sincerely welcome your questions and comments. I afford a selection of teaching strategies and lesson plans which you can accommodate to a vast heterogeneous population of students. They correlate with the content standards for all states. Lastly, assessment techniques will be included for teacher perusal as a measurable means of student success.
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