U.S. Social Movements through Biography

Rationale

This four-week unit plan is designed for eleventh-grade students in IB History of the Americas classes at William W. Bodine High School for International Affairs.  Bodine is a magnet high school in the School District of Philadelphia (SDP).  Bodine is located in Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties neighborhood and serves roughly 600 students.  Middle school grades, attendance, disciplinary records, state test scores, and other criteria determine student admission.  The SDP operates as a Title I school district; under this policy, all students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.  Over ninety-five percent of students at Bodine live below the poverty line.  Students attend daily class periods of fifty-three minutes each.  Bodine offers Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) courses to its upperclassmen.  This unit can be used in AP and IB courses and for ninth, tenth, and eleventh-grade students.

This curriculum unit aims to strengthen the Industrial and Imperial Expansionism unit I teach for the Emergence of the Americas in Global Affairs (1880-1929) IB History Depth Study.  This unit will be taught during the fourth marking period and will take four weeks to complete.  Students will study the Industrial Revolution, Gilded Age, and the beginnings of the Labor Movement by first examining two case studies: the Homestead Strike and the General Strike of 1910.  These case studies will allow students to learn about the origins of the Labor Movement and how laborers organized first in industrial sectors and then in service-based jobs.  Students will conclude the unit by examining the economic impact of labor unions throughout the twentieth century.  Ideally, this curriculum unit will help students see the similarities in wealth inequality during the Gilded Age compared to today’s world.  Additionally, students will study how the economic developments during the Industrial Revolution, Gilded Age, and the Labor Movement impacted the United States’ involvement in foreign affairs.  The coverage of these topics and the inquiry-based approach towards document analysis will provide students with the opportunity to successfully take the IB History Exam at the end of their twelfth-grade year.

IB History

At Bodine High School, I teach IB History, a two-year course offering that allows students to take the three-part IB History exam at the end of the program.  The IB Diploma Program offers teachers flexibility in teaching the course and which topics they teach (see Figure 1).  In their junior year, students must enroll in a course titled IB History of the Americas.

Figure 1: The chart lists the topics that the IB History program at Bodine High School teaches its students in the eleventh-grade course IB History of the Americas.  The bold headings are the depth studies listed on the IB History Exam, while the titles beneath each bold heading are the units I teach to fulfill the content of each IB History Depth Study.

As seniors, students can elect to matriculate into Social Science or the second year of IB History by taking the IB 20^th Century World History course.  Regardless of which course they choose to enroll in during their senior year of high school, this curriculum unit will serve as a reference point for students when learning about World War One, the Interwar Period, World War Two, and the politics of the twentieth century.