Activities
Text Sets
“Text sets are collections of texts tightly focused on a specific topic. They may include varied genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and so forth) and media (such as blogs, maps, photographs, art, primary-source documents, and audio recordings).”58 It is vital that students have opportunities to read a variety of texts, not only to meet the Common Core Standards; but for the practical purposes of what life brings them in regard to what they will need to read, process, and comprehend during their lifetimes. Text sets geared towards having students acquire academic content knowledge; help to achieve this goal. As I was thinking about my unit, I wanted to set it up much like our seminar, with a few common readings and, choice texts – ones they will choose to read for themselves. For each text set, students will synthesize their increasing more complex texts by answering a few overarching questions much like the ones Jill Campbell, or our seminar leader, provided us for our seminar readings in that students must find textual evidence to support the points in their synthesis. The text sets will be set up to mirror the three objectives students must meet to demonstrate mastery of the content – two of which are the socialization of gender and the causes and consequences of classifying people by gender. The third objective is specific to having students formulate and evaluate their personal reactions to the sociological concept of gender.
A Visit to the Local Mall
A field trip serves to enrich the delivery and/or understanding of content area knowledge. In our case, it also serves another purpose in that students can be in the same place at the same time instead of being separated by distance and cameras. Students will be teamed up with their classmates from the sister high schools to work together. They will wander through our local mall and photograph examples of gender which they will upload as photo collections with the hashtag #DrPDTCCSOCGender. Student groups will create captions for each of the photographs. A list will be provided for students indicating which vocabulary terms are to be addressed in the photos. Before leaving the mall, there will be a culminating activity in which group members are mixed up and there is a sharing time to determine the photo collections’ commonalities and differences.
Artifact to Photo Essay
The initial activity will include a written explanation accompanying an artifact that represents students' gender. I will model this activity for them using – I believe – my MAC lipstick (Viva Glam III) which I rarely deviate from. I envision this looking like a show-and-tell time in which students will have an opportunity to explain to others how they believe the item to represent their gender. Each student will write an object label that will help orient classmates to each individual’s “gender narrative” modeled after my own. An “object label reflects the museum’s time-honored role as keeper and classifier of treasured objects and artifacts of history. Reading between the lines of the object label there is a legible trace of the social, fiscal, and educational forces underpinning the entire enterprise of museums.”59 Reflecting on this meaning, on a micro level, students will be the “keeper and classifier” of their gender representative objects. On a macro level, students will be able to see how “forces” outside of themselves determine their understandings of even their own gender. The culminating activity will be a photo essay of A Day in My Life through the lens of gender. I’m thinking that it would be “museum-like” in that they will provide introductory, section, and object labels for the assignment. It will be digital given the environment we find ourselves in so that we can easily share our photo essays with each other. This activity, in particular, helps students to meet the third objective of their own reactions to the sociological concept of gender – where do they see themselves and how can they demonstrate this to others.
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