Objectives
Our state's recommended curriculum units are created following the Understanding by Design model based on research and theory by Grant and Wiggins. 49 The overarching idea is to teach for understanding beginning from the end, focusing on what you want students to know. Enduring Understandings are the big ideas of the unit and are vital to students' comprehension of content and concepts. They have lasting value and help to make the content meaningful. The following Enduring Understandings are taken from the Core Concepts of our textbook's chapter on Race and Ethnicity. By the end of the unit, students will know that the concepts of race and ethnicity cannot be understood apart from systems of racial and ethnic classification and that governments and other powerful groups have created illogical racial and ethnic categories and have worked hard to present them as logical as one measure of their social importance. In addition, they will grasp that the racial and ethnic categories to which people belong are a product of three interrelated factors: chance, context, and choice. Students will additionally ascertain that the legal status of the foreign-born varies by country and is often connected to race and ethnicity. Also, students will see that minorities are populations that are systematically excluded (whether consciously or unconsciously) from full participation in society and denied equal access to positions of power, prestige, and wealth. Moreover, students will comprehend that social and cultural differences between racial and ethnic groups "disappear" when one group is absorbed into another group's culture and social networks or when two groups merge to form a new, blended culture. Lastly, students will recognize that racist ideologies claim that biological factors explain and even justify inequalities between racial and ethnic groups and that sociologists are interested in stigmas – attributes that are so deeply discrediting that they come to dominate interaction.
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