Rationale
Hearne High School is a Title One School in Hearne, TX. Our student body is approximately 80-90% minority students, with Hispanic and African American students predominating. As such, many of our students have some difficulty connecting with more traditional history curricula, with their focus on European history and advancements. In addition, many students struggle with the question of “why does this matter?” when it comes to history, though this is of course not a unique problem to my school or district. This unit will address both problems by giving focus to the cultures of men and women that share a heritage with my students, as well as examining how the incidents and conflicts of the colonial period still resonate in racial conflicts and relations in the present.
This unit is intended to address these issues with this unit by allowing students to connect with their heritage, European, African, or American, through the art produced by those people. The results will include engagement with the material, a new appreciation for the value of art in their lives, and the truths that it can convey, as well as a recognition that the issues faced by the people of the colonial period continue to inform the issues that they themselves face in day to day life in the modern era.
Through the use of art, students will be able to engage with the past in a way similar to the people the art was originally made for. Their eyes will be seeing the same thing as the viewers two hundred years ago, and though their context will likely be quite different, it will still bring them closer to the material, and help them to recognize the inherent similarities they share with the people of the colonial period on both sides of colonization.
Being a largely minority community, the students of Hearne are very aware that, while racial equality has made great strides in the years since the Civil Rights Act, we are still far from living in a world where race has no bearing at all on one’s life. Often one of the questions they have is “Why are things this way?” Through seeing how their ancestors viewed one another, I will allow them to seek their own answers to this question through the art that those people created both of themselves and others.
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