Objectives/Goals
Every teaching unit has multiple goals, which crisscross in design and implementation. The three primary goals during the design of this unit have been, first, to use pictorial resources to provide historical context and crossover practice in English Language Arts (ELA) skills such as reading and contextualization; second, to create a unit that employs the shifts in the Common Core away from frontloading and towards close reading; and third, to combine images and texts to increase both historical empathy and critical analysis. The Rationale section below will elaborate on these three foci.
The learning objectives for this unit are for students to be able to use presented historical images to practice powers of observation, interpretation, and inference, and then translate these skills from picture interpretation to close reading of fiction and nonfiction texts. Students should be able to focus on reading the text itself first, reaching for teacher-provided context only after their own struggle and after searching through the novel for clues to the historical context. Students will analyze how extended metaphors are used in this text, and they will be able to make connections to visual representations of the metaphors. During unit exercises, students will strengthen their skills in visualizing significant moments in the text, linking specific passages with drawings in which they endeavor to sketch, describe, and explain their "inner pictures." After close reading of images and texts, students should become motivated to research images and historical context for and through Forge, and make connections to Social Studies content before, during, and after reading the text. All this should help them express their budding fervor for social justice through an essay and art project that will, I expect, express their admiration of our founding ideals mixed with outrage over social hypocrisy in early America, while maintaining empathy for people's needs to conform to most norms of their time and place.
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