Rationale
Though my MLL students have wide gaps in their knowledge of American history, they are keen observers of American culture, especially in relation to the power dynamics of race, class, and gender. While all of my students demonstrate varying English proficiency levels, they are all beginning or developing English language skills to participate fully and independently in English-immersion content area classes. Therefore, it is essential that each unit I teach in my sheltered English language arts class prioritize both language and content knowledge to support their growth toward advanced academic English language proficiency.
The current English 11 curriculum unit that I teach about American homeownership encompasses a plethora of dense texts that are largely inaccessible to my MLL students. With proper scaffolding and accommodations, my students can work through the texts to reach content objectives. However, I have found that the prescribed curriculum texts chart a painstaking and circuitous route to understanding of key content objectives; as a result, students often become frustrated and disengaged before we reach the unit’s culminating task.
In developing this supplemental unit to complement the district-mandated unit, my intention is to create a more “direct” route for students to reach content objectives. As such, the unit will utilize maps as visual learning tools to teach the history of housing discrimination in America. They will then apply the evidence they gather during their map analysis to analyze how this history has influenced current trends in American homeownership.
Maps are an excellent tool to facilitate grade-level content and language learning with MLLs that will forego much of the tedious and confusing reading of historical and informational texts. For instance, maps are visual texts that require analytical and inferential skills that can also be transferred and applied to traditional text analysis. Maps are also dynamic visuals that facilitate oral and written observations. Further, maps are historical documents from which students can gather evidence to form claims in response to the unit’s essential question. Thus, students will learn and practice critical analysis skills while building historical and rhetorical content knowledge to produce a written argument at the end of the larger teaching unit.
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