Objectives
Enduring Understandings
I believe in the life long learning process; my students at Edison (or anywhere for that matter) should not graduate from our school in order to “get out of the ghetto” and never return. Instead, I believe that those who learn anything must recognize the responsibility to give back to the community that taught it to them. Even though we begin in North Philadelphia, students will learn processes that will endure no matter where they go; in other words, “Act locally, think globally”, as the 1960s activist Abbie Hoffman once said. Students in this unit should understand that while the topography may change wherever they go, their approach to learning can be the same: keep an open mind, imagine what other points of view there may be, and cooperate with others to learn more than you can learn alone. A Public History study, and public historians generally, attempt to present history for community dialogue, inspire a nuanced conversation which has the potential to raise awareness of the collective decisions we make about our environment, and provoke discussion of how we contextualize lessons in that communal space called our mutual history. Public historians believe that “history and historical-cultural memory matter in the way people go about their day-to-day lives”.2
Content Objectives/Assessments
I believe writing is thinking made real; it’s where the rubber meets the road. Nonetheless, there is a lot of preparation that goes into a well-written idea, an articulate point of view, a clear expression of belief or a persuasive argument. As an English teacher in the state of Pennsylvania I am bound by a professional obligation to meet the expectations of the PA Common Core State Standards where it indicates that we should “Analyze the interaction and development of a complex set of ideas...over the course of a text (...in an informational text: see the Appendix of this unit for more specific details and links). Furthermore, while my students in 11th grade English Language Arts are not subjected to Benchmark tests or Keystone State Exams, I endeavor to prepare them for college level thinking, reading, speaking, listening, and writing. Each teacher must make an effort to cultivate in his or her students a scholarly ability to accomplish much of our work through a collaborative process, in addition to independent work, and this unit should engender in all students a sincere ability to do so.
Our main graduation requirement at Edison HS is that students engage in an authentic research project. This expectation has traditionally taken the form of a 5-10 page cross-curricular essay on a topic of each student chooses for him/herself; the unit presented here can be an excellent introduction to exploring research methods as they pertain to any content aspect of a local park environment, and I attempt to provide the framework of public history as an organizational approach that encompasses a variety of learning styles.
Essential Questions
How can we reframe questions to see our mutual history in new ways? How have certain voices been left out of the narrative around what we as a human society have built in our environment? How can we present history to an audience outside of the academy, and even outside of our classroom? These essential questions provide necessary guidelines to inquiry, as well as to the production of history that is conscientious of the complexity o historical writing, as well as to a nuanced perspective on how it can be shared with others.
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