Teaching Strategies and Timing of the Unit
The unit will be taught in the last marking period of the second semester after students have learned about master and counter-narratives, de jure segregation and de facto segregation in education and in housing, and the social movements in the 1960s and the 1970s.
Analysis of primary and secondary sources: students will interpret historical and current data on laws passed at the state and local level, political cartoons and speeches that depicted young people of color as criminals, data on racial profiling, and the neighborhood’s crime rate, income levels, unemployment rate to understand why young people of color are disproportionately overrepresented in the juvenile justice system.
Socratic Seminar: Using academic literature on the criminalization of young people of color, such as articles, images, op-ed, newspaper articles, students will discuss the essential questions in a Socratic seminar.
Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) Project: students will address the three issues proposed in the content - increase in juvenile crime, high arrest and citation rate for youth in the 95122 zip code, and violence (fights) in school. They will gather data by conducting surveys and interviews in school and in the neighborhood. They will analyze the data and come up with proposals to help solve the issues they picked.
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