Race, Class, and Punishment

Teaching Strategies

Essential Question and Hook

Our Social Studies Framework requires that we teach each unit with an essential question. My essential question for this unit is, what is justice and is it equal for everyone? The learning goals that I have for my students are to analyze a primary source, describe the significant of the law codes, and create solutions for restorative justice in our school. I will begin the unit with a hook to create a universal experience that we can refer back to during the unit. The students sit in eight tables of four. I will have each table be an independent city-state. Each of them will have a role, just as members of society did in Mesopotamia. One person will be the king, a government official, a farmer, and a slave. This can be a random distribution. I will explain to the students that right now, although they are close to one another, they are living in independent city-states. They have their own king, their own government, and source of economy. Next, I will have them all push their tables together. This will cause some chaos and commotion because there may not be enough room to put all of the chairs. The slaves must first give their chairs to the kings, and the government officials. Next, I will tell them that their city-states have just been united into one empire. I will ask the students to look around and describe what they see. There may not be enough room for everyone, it is crowded, and they have to figure out where to sit. We will then have a discussion about what are some predictions about what will happen in our civilization as we unite into one. What are the pros, and what are the cons. Next, we will decide what we should do now that we have one empire. I will direct them to think about how we can alleviate the chaos and create some kind of order in our new civilization.

Important Vocabulary

With the students’ suggestions I will explain that we will be looking at Hammurabi’s Law Code, which was a response to the chaos that erupted in Mesopotamia after the city-states united into one empire. We will define our important terms that are specific to our unit such as, cuneiform, empire, code, and tribute. We will begin our definition of justice after we discuss background knowledge from Mesopotamia.

This will be an opportunity to also define primary and secondary source. We will use this to analyze our first viewing of Hammurabi’s Code. It is an opportunity for students to start making connections to the law codes and rules that we have today and what purposes they serve. These may also be similar to some of the solutions that they suggested for alleviating the conflicts that occurred when we united all of the city-states.

Mock Court Cases

The bulk of the unit will be enacting court cases and applying laws to determine how justice should be served in ancient Mesopotamia. Each student will have their own part in the court cases and will act them out for the class. The audience will serve as the jury and use the primary source of the law codes to decide the outcome of the court cases. Another important factor to the court cases is the idea of class and status in society. The outcome of the court cases will differ depending on your social class. This is also an opportunity to discuss what they feel is just, or not just, and why. I would like to take this opportunity to define the word justice and begin our initial ideas to answer our essential question, what is justice and is it equal for everyone?

PBIS and Mock Scenarios

For this portion of the unit, I will take the time to teach our school rules, or Cobra Courtesies. Similar to the hook activity, students will think about the elementary schools that they come from and the different rules, or PBIS system that they had. Just as the independent city-states uniting into one empire, we are uniting our previous independent ideas of school rules, into a new cohesive system, the Cobra Courtesies. This will also be an opportunity to teach students about our school discipline system and the disparity in the data for who is suspended the most, compared to the demographics of our school. This will be an opportunity to teach about the school-to-prison-pipeline. I will also have the students start to question why we have rules in school, and make connections to Mesopotamia. I want students to begin to think about why students misbehave, and what are the common behaviors that you see at school of students who are misbehaving? I will use this opportunity to teach students about the implications of the discipline system and who is affected the most in our school. As a class, we will do a close read of an article from Teaching Tolerance.

Next, we will look at mock scenarios that I will create of behavior at schools. As we read each case, I will add a different layer each time such as, “the student had to walk to school because no one was there to take them.” We will use our Cobra Courtesies to decide what the best way to treat the situation is, and if it a referral or suspension is the right choice.

School-to-prison-pipeline video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04pcSyzwoTg

Article for School-to-Prison-Pipeline:

https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/spring-2013/the-schooltoprison-pipeline

Restorative Justice

The final piece of the unit before we make our connections back to Hammurabi’s Code is to teach about restorative justice as an option to improving and preventing behavior issues at our school. Students will participate in a mock Restorative Justice Circle. They will all have their own roles, such as the court cases, and they will contribute to a discussion from all perspectives and come up with the best solutions. Then, they will write a reflection about their ideas of restorative justice.

Reflection Writing Activity Options (pick one):

1. Write a poem about the school-to-prison pipeline
2. Restorative justice is one solution that is being suggested to stop the school-to-prison pipeline. Write about what you think that word might mean. There are no wrong answers! What does that word mean to you?
3. Write about what you think schools could do to make all students feel more welcome in the classroom
4. Write about what makes you want to go to school. Write about what makes you feel like you are a part of your school community. Is it friends? Teachers? A specific subject?³¹

Final Connections and Mastering the Standards

For the final assessment of the unit, students will describe the significance of Hammurabi’s Code in Mesopotamia. Then, they will bridge their understanding of justice in the first development of civilization, to their ideas of justice in our school. They will come up with one idea for a solution to alleviate and prevent behavior issues in school. They will also describe one obstacle that they may encounter, and what their response will be.