Strategies
As mentioned earlier, the main purpose of my unit is to get my students to speculate about the future of human and virus relationships. I would like for my students to take what they have learned and use it to hypothesize the future evolution of both humans and viruses. To accomplish, they will have to understand many facts about virology, which is why so much information is included in the rationale and the background sections of the unit. The better they understand the topic, the better their hypotheses will be. Therefore, it will be critical for them and I to reinforce any other major ideas discussed, until we feel comfortable enough to move forward.
Clearly, this is much easier said than done. Much of what needs to be done to make this a reality occurs in the beginning of the unit. In order for me to sustain their motivation throughout the unit, I will have to hook them in during the beginning stages of this process. I have found that regardless of how exciting a subject may be to me, my students might feel otherwise. Therefore, when developing this unit, my first challenge was to identify what interests my students and how it all relates to viruses. It dawned on me that the history of humans and viruses told a story of winners and losers. Sometimes one side was victorious and then other times the opposing side would claim victory. This back and forth, between humans and viruses in particular, has been taking place since the beginning of our existence.
For some reason, this sounded very much like the war stories I learned about in history and social studies class, or even the wars that we hear about in today's world. I was able connect this idea to the many discussions I've had with my students about wars, battles, and fights that they had come across. Therefore, from the outset of this unit, I decided that the central theme would be the war between viruses and humans.
Even though war is a topic that I know most students will enjoy, I didn't want to spend the entire unit focused on the history of humans and viruses. I was afraid that many of the lessons would end up seeming too much like history class, where most of what was learned focused on the dates, places, and events that propagated the war between humans and viruses. Instead, I wanted much more of the unit to focus on a predictive component, where the students will take what they learned and hypothesize about possible future worlds with humans and viruses. Ultimately this will lead to us reaching our culminating activity, which has the students create hypothesized worlds in the form of comic books.
Building up to this point will require scaffolding and the development of their understanding to prepare them for final project. This process will encourage them to learn about topics as they come up, giving them ownership over what they learn. This form of self-discovery should help to galvanize their confidence on the topic, and lay the foundation from which they will depend on throughout the unit.
The first day of this journey will begin with a simple game of "battle competition" between different animals. This will be the piece that hooks them into the unit. They will make predictions about who they think will win and why. Then, they will watch the video clip play out on YouTube, to test out their predictions. After each battle clip is completed, we will discuss as a class, what gave each animal an advantage over the other. The Animal Planet channel does a really good job of explaining each of these battles and what would give a particular animal an advantage over the other. This could serve as a great line of support when teaching this topic. The last battle I will display on the board will be of human vs virus. I expect students to be perplexed at first, wondering about the type of battle they are observing. This is when I will begin to introduce to them the raging war that has been taking place between humans and viruses since the beginning of our time on earth.
The next day we will begin to identify specific viruses and highlight the features that make them unique. The viruses we will observe will range from small to big, least virulent to most virulent, ancient to modern, and separate them based on their characteristics. Following that, the class will break up into groups. The groups will be split in half and given a particular virus to research. For example, if I have 6 groups in a class, I will give three groups one type of virus and the other 3 groups another type of virus. Inside of each of the sets of groups their responsibilities will be broken down even further so that each group in the set will be given an assignment to either research the past, present or future evolution of a virus. After the research is complete, we will all reconvene as a class and discuss what they have found. This should help them to understand how viruses differ and how closely they are related to human evolution.
As we move forward through the unit, my students should begin to gain a deeper understanding of the topic. Accordingly, we will spend the next day discussing the give and take relationship that humans and viruses share. The centerpiece for this discussion will be HIV/AIDS. In fact, to illuminate this relationship my students will group together and work on a case study that involves the virology of HIV/AIDS. The goal, again, is to enrich my student's knowledge of viruses and their relationship with humans; therefore I believe that by focusing on a virus such as HIV/AIDS, my students will have an easier time relating to the topic since it is one of the biggest epidemics of our lifetime. Ultimately, what they should take away from this activity is that, both organisms are just trying to survive and reproduce, which seems to be the main purpose of evolution. Other factors that contribute to evolution will also be addressed, like population size and other environmental factors. If they can grasp these ideas, then it should become clear to them that viruses are very much conduits of gene flow, keeping the world in constant state of evolution.
The next day of class will introduce a brand new idea to my students. We will discuss some revolutionary news in science and talk about its significance. I will explain to them that 8% of our DNA is viral, and that some of the genes in the 8% are the reason we are here today. So my students will begin to understand, that we are, in fact, mutants that have joined forces with viruses to make us who we are today, giving new meaning to the phrase, "if you can't beat them, join them". They will use the new found knowledge and participate in, what we call, a Socratic Seminar to debate the future of the human-virus relationship. Using their facts and opinions they will debate what they believe the future of our relationship to be and support their arguments with facts that they have collected from the previous lessons. Some possible ideas to discuss are: who wins the war, what a full integration of human and virus DNA may look like, and the potential phenotypes that could arise from the mutation and integration of human-virus DNA.
During those 5 days my students will be building as much background knowledge as they can to prepare for the final, culminating activity. The 5 days that follow will engage my students in a project based activity that will involve all of the concepts we will have learned on viruses. The activity will involve my students creating a comic book that tells the story of the human-virus relationship. They will be given specific parameters to set the stage for how they will tell the story. I will encourage my students to think creatively and come up with ways to tell the story in a fantastical manner. Their stories will be hypothetical and build on their debate of the future of the human-virus relationship.
Getting started is often the hardest part of writing a story; therefore I will provide many examples of similar stories that have already been told. Examples such as television show The Walking Dead, and movies I Am Legend, and X-Men all deal with some type of post-apocalyptic event that caused a significant change in the human gene pool. Each story uniquely focuses on the theoretical outcomes, if such an event were to occur. Providing my students with these examples should inspire them to come up with their own version of the story. After generating their ideas, they will outline the plot of the story so that it can be peer reviewed. Following the peer review, I will check that the stories are aligned with the topics discussed in class and they will proceed to make their comic books. A rubric will accompany this activity to guide them through the process and ensure that they know exactly what is expected of them. The rubric will include the outline/concept map, spelling and grammar, research and writing, and creativity and it can all be found in the appendices of this unit.
I believe that ending the unit with this activity will be a lot of fun for my students. It will give them the opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of the concepts in a creative and engaging way.
Ironically, I believe that many of the ideas my students create, will be more feasible than many people would think. Which is what makes the topic so interesting and why many movies and science fiction stories have used these ideas at their foundation to explain our potential future. If my students understand the feasibility of many of their ideas, it could inspire them to pursue these concepts in the future. If nothing else, my students should take away from this unit the idea that, the human-virus relationship has had major impact on evolution on this planet, producing some of the most amazing marvels of our world. There is no reason to doubt, that if business continues as usual, we will see the development and creation of some of the more amazing things we can and cannot imagine.
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