Rationale
The opportunity to attend a seminar on Adaptation at the Yale National Teachers' Institute provided the resources, expertise, and collegiality I needed to research my unit's topic. I am very grateful to share the resources of Yale University's Sterling Memorial library, Beinecke Library of rare manuscripts, and the Yale Film Library. I'm also grateful for the opportunity to share my research with fellow educators. This experience has truly changed the ways in which I used film in my classroom for the last 17 years, and it offers an exciting new pedagogy. Not only my long time love for Wells' The War of the Worlds but also the knowledge that much help would be available to me led to this pursuit and the hard work it entailed on researching the century beginning with 1898 and designing a curriculum appropriate for middle school.. The end result is a unit which you will find easy to incorporate into your classroom and to possibly use as an interdisciplinary unit with your social studies colleague. It easily adapts itself to your teaching style, teaching goals, and course content. New Mexico Language Arts content standard three states that student will use literature and the media to develop an understanding of society and the self. Exposing them to a century of books, radio, periodicals and film masters speaks to this standard. In our quest to teach critical thinking skills to our students, we teach them to look at what is known, what is excellent. I picture our students working each to his/her own level of expertise, involved and engaged, with The War of the Worlds media.
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