Context and Relevance
I teach children. In essence that is the only context needed for this unit to apply, in some way, to you. As humans we all have cultural lenses that we need to dissect, understand, and re-form following reflection. I teach high school, a group both more and less capable than younger students to evaluate their lenses and begin the work of "personal archeology," or the digging through the layers of what has been learned. I teach on the South side of Chicago at a school that is growing in size and shifting in demographics. It is this shifting demographic from 85% African American and 15% Latino for the senior class to a near even split of these two populations for this year's entering freshman class that makes this unit more urgently needed.
This unit is designed for a ninth grade Human Geography course. It aligns with my unit on culture, religion, and "identity" (which includes race/ethnicity, gender and sexuality) and is meant as a supplemental enrichment to the unit content itself. This unit also works with any teacher who is aligning with other courses thematically. As an entire ninth grade team, we begin the year with the theme of identity. For this reason we have chosen the chapters referenced above in the human geography text and I have chosen the readings, videos, and imagery to correspond with issues of identity that relate to these three areas. This unit could also work well with a humanities, psychology, or sociology course as well as a course on leadership through self-awareness.
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