Classroom Activities
Dematerializing Products
To begin this unit, I want to capture student interest and set the stage for inquiry into the transnational and global nature of industrial activities. I will ask students to sit in a circle and take out their cellphones. I will pass out world maps and ask students to identify where their cell phone comes from. I expect that some students will point to the United States and indicate that they bought it at their local Apple store. I also expect that some students will point to China, identifying where the cellphone may have been manufactured.
I will prompt students to consider the different parts of their cellphone, and we will create a list of the different parts. Students will likely identify the glass screen, the metal exterior, the camera, and the interior microchip. As students begin to consider their cell phones as composed of more than one material, I will then prompt them to consider if all of these materials come from one place.
At this point in the activity, I will direct students to a short article describing some of the precious metals and minerals that are mined as a part of the process in cell phone and electronics manufacturing. We will use the world map to identify each mining location. We will also read and discuss the humanitarian and ecological issues involved in the mining of these precious metals and minerals. In completing this unit-opening activity, students will begin to develop an understanding of the human and environmental implications at the core of industrial activities.
Global Industrialization Timeline
To build background knowledge and teach key vocabulary, students will sort and sequence a global industrialization timeline. Students will read a series of short, illustrated descriptions of industrial innovations that include locations, dates, and vocabulary such as “factory” and “city.” Students will then organize and sequence each description on a timeline from the 1700s to the early 1900s.
Once students have assembled their timelines, I will ask them to return to each industrial innovation and consider one or more effects of the inventions produced during periods of industrialization. For example, the steam engine required wood, coal, or oil to operate; therefore, one effect of the steam engine innovation was the need for raw materials, like wood and coal.
After students have identified different effects stemming from industrial innovations, I will ask them to consider how these effects impacted the environment and human populations. I expect students to identify both positive and negative impacts on the land and the people. For example, students will likely identify the ability to travel from place to place more quickly after the invention of the steam-powered train. However, I also expect students to identify the need for wood and the deforestation that resulted from this innovation.
Language Learning Through Visual Analysis
Throughout this unit, students will engage with images and use language to describe the image and the artist’s theme. As the unit progresses, students’ visual analysis of each image will become increasingly more complex, as they learn and apply new vocabulary, grammar functions, and content knowledge.
In the first part of the unit, students will analyze images from the American Industrial Revolution; then, in the second part of the unit, students will analyze images from the Mexican Industrial Revolution, and compare and contrast how industrialization affected Mexican society and landscapes versus American society and landscapes. Visual analysis will be a critical component in each section of the unit, and will be intentionally scaffolded as students build language skills and content knowledge. At the beginning of the unit, we will conduct visual analyses in whole-class and collaborative groups, and use sentence stems to produce a written theme analysis. The visual analysis modeling and collaborative group work will occur over several class periods, and each class period will begin with a grammar or vocabulary lesson, or review lesson. By the end of the unit, students will be able to visually analyze an image and write a short, concise theme-analysis of an image independently.
Before beginning the unit, students will review previously learned grammar forms, specifically the present tense, present progressive tense, and WH-question forms. As I model visual analysis skills, I will prompt students to build on previous grammar knowledge to produce increasingly complex sentences to describe an image.
I will begin my visual analysis modeling by asking students to observe a projected image silently for a whole minute. Then, I will divide the projected image into four parts. I will prompt students to begin identifying objects, people, and landscape features in the image. I will write the words that students identify in the margins of the image with arrows pointing to what they have described.
After students have produced a number of nouns to describe the image, I will ask students to describe the actions in the image. In a different color, I will circle the actions and write the verbs they use to describe the actions.
Next, I will direct students to a notice and wonder chart. Here, they will record their observations in complete sentences and develop questions to research. I will model simple sentences using present and present progressive tense with the verbs and nouns that students have identified in the first part of the visual analysis. Additionally, I will model how to expand simple sentences into more complex sentences. For example, if we have formed the sentence “The train is moving,” I will prompt students with WH-questions to use adjectives and prepositional phrases to add detail to the sentence, resulting in a more complex observation like, “The black train is moving through the town.”
Once students have produced a number of observations about the image, I will prompt students to make inquiries about the image. Students will use previously learned WH-question words to form questions and set a purpose for reading a short, historical article about the image. If students have produced an observation like “The factory is making smoke,” I will prompt them to form a related WH-question such as, “What does the factory make?” or “Who works in the factory?” Students will consider these questions when reading the background information about the image. Students will complete structured grammar lessons on simple past tense forms during this part of the unit in order to comprehend the history texts.
After reading the historical background information about the image, students will produce a short, written response that demonstrates contextual understanding of the image as it relates to the environmental and social impacts of industrialization. These written responses will vary; students may write a short summary, an imitation museum description card, or a brief diary entry from the point of view of an individual in the image.
In the final part of the visual analysis, students will identify the artist’s theme. I will model theme identification techniques by prompting students to identify big ideas related to an image, like deforestation or child labor. Then, we will select one or two ideas and create a theme statement about the artist’s theme using a sentence stem such as The artist believes that … For example, our class may create a draft theme statement such as The artist believes that child labor is terrible and unfair. Then, I will model how to restate the theme statement more concisely by crossing out The artist believes that … and replacing it with The theme of this image shows …
Next, I will model how to identify visual evidence to support the theme statement by returning to the notice and wonder chart. With my guidance, students will identify relevant observations to support the theme statement and add information gathered from the historical article to explain how each piece of evidence supports the theme statement. We will use sentence stems like In the image, the artist shows… to introduce evidence and This shows … to introduce supporting explanations of historical significance.
As the unit progresses, I will slowly remove scaffolds to incrementally require students to demonstrate independent mastery of content and language objectives. All classroom activities will serve as opportunities to apply newly learned language and content; moreover, students will have a number of jointly-constructed theme analysis paragraphs to support their independent construction of a theme analysis at the end of the unit.
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