Rationale and Objectives
Is Democracy for everyone? Can a population of uneducated people perform the basic functions of a democracy? Should the United States be involved in assisting or promoting democratic movements around the world? Are human rights, equality and economic opportunity dependent on a democratic political system? These questions are not only central to understanding US foreign policy; they are also necessary when analyzing modern political and philosophical movements globally. Recent democratic movements in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia highlight the dramatic changes in political structures and public opinion that have taken place in the last fifty years. Our students need to be able to analyze their own country's involvement in these political revolutions to determine how and when to spread American ideals and values, now and in the future.
I teach at an alternative choice school for nontraditional high schools students. My Advanced Placement World History course is offered to students in tenth through twelfth grades, ages sixteen and up. The makeup of my classes is predominantly minority and economically challenged students with limited support systems and few life experiences beyond their own zip code. This makes teaching the last one hundred years of political change in World History the perfect time to educate students on current events by connecting with their own experiences of democracy.
In past years I have noticed that regardless of how much technology or differentiation I add to this unit, my students disengage easily and feel disconnected from the content. After years of questioning, I believe this is because they do not have a clear concrete idea of what democracy is in America and they lack diverse experiences for comparison. Their knowledge is based on a string of facts memorized, though never learned or understood, from Civics and TV cop dramas. In this unit, my goal is to provide students a clear foundation for their own political beliefs and their views of some of the contemporary global democratic movements that were influenced by the United States.
From Japan to Grenada, from Tiananmen Square to the crises in Egypt and Libya, social and political movements around the world have echoed the ideas that created the United States. Analyzing the United States as an idea instead of a country will help students connect to the ideas that may seem foreign at first, but are intrinsic to American society. This unit will provide the teacher and the students with a background for analyzing modern global movements and activities necessary for students to evaluate the idea of America as both a template for positive change and target of anti-American sentiment.
They say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, and since World War I countries around the world have adapted and adopted different aspects of American culture and ideology with varying degrees of success. This raises questions about how the idea of American is being disseminated and why it is attractive to groups trying to recreate or reinvent their societies. The rapid globalization of the last 100 years and the rise in available information due to the internet, as well as the Facebook phenomenon, have greatly influenced the spread of American ideals, from trivialities such as music, celebrities, and fashion to the big ideals of government, democracy, and freedoms.
The ideology of the United States has created a system that encourages "buy in" of American Democracy that results in countries around the world modeling their society in our image. My goal with this unit is to help students understand our unique form of democracy in the United States. This understanding, presented in a way that they can relate to, will allow them to analyze the expansion of America by shifting its borders, as well as US influence and success in exporting American Democracy globally.
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