Monday, December 10, 2018

Civil Rights, Day 12 - Class Recap


The Rocky statue outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I will bet you probably know the theme song!

Dear class,

It was great to be back with everyone today, after only one day seeing you all last week! Here's what we did today in class:

Learning Targets Addressed:
Behavior LT 1: I can self direct my learning.
Communication LT 1: I can communicate effectively, both verbally and in writing.
Knowledge LT 16: I can explain the process of change and continuity in a society, place, or region.
Knowledge LT 19: I can explain the role and impacts of social hierarchies.

Soundtrack: "Rocky Theme" from Rocky. Selected for today because of our work today regarding music and activism! Lyrics here.

AGENDA 12/10/18:
News Brief – Kyle
Debrief Children’s March
Songs for Activism
Work Time

Homework: Read the blog. Continue working on your Activism Project and Songs for Activism assignment! Next news brief: Jalen.

News Brief: Kyle had the news brief today and selected an article about this story to talk about: BBC.com - Huawei arrest: China demands Canada free Meng Wanzhou. After discussing the story, we also checked in to see if anyone was up to anything interesting or fun outside of class over the weekend.

Jalen was selected to do the next news brief.

As part of the news brief, we also watched the one minute BBC World News update. Here's the link to see the latest one minute update, at any time of day (it will probably be different from what we watched in class):

Debrief Children's March: Last class, with the guest teacher, students watched a short film about the "Children's March" and non-violent activism. This was the handout:


Today in class, we debriefed the film together and talked about the importance of activism, as it relates to our unit!

Songs for Activism: Next, I introduced what I think will be a pretty fun assignment - listening to music with a partner (if students chose to), and identifying events and/or issues that the song is about. To start, we went through some examples a class, here:


We analyzed the lyrics as I played the songs in the presentation. Then, I gave students this assignment to work on in class:


The idea here was to have some fun in listening to music (which almost everyone enjoys!) and see how music as an art form can be used to further a cause (like the one you are working on for your project)!

Work Time: The rest of class was dedicated to working on the music for activism assignment above, along with the Activism Project, which is where students choose to identify a cause that they care about and create a poster or brochure explaining why and how people could be involved. Here's the assignment sheet that I passed out:


This assignment will be due the last day we meet before break, December 20th. If you are leaving before that day for break, you will need to turn it in before.

Generally, students can choose almost anything that they want to, but I do want to hear about the issue before embarking on too much work. We will set aside a fair amount of class time before the break to do this, and I will provide large sheets of paper, but if a student wants to go above and beyond in working on the project at home or with a poster board, that is obviously great as well.

Some examples of student choices are:

Climate Change
Animal Rights
Gun Issues
Immigration/Border Issues
Human Trafficking 

Thanks for your continued work and engagement with the Civil Rights unit! We will keep at it next week. Here's our tentative schedule for our next few classes until break:

December 10 (above): Music as Activism (graded) – partner assignment

December 12 (Wednesday): Share Music/Work time on Activism Project

December 14: MLK vs. Malcolm X – Whose Ideas Were Best?

December 18: Activism Project Work Time (final day)

December 20: Activism Project presentations/gallery walk/Unfinished Business with Civil Rights

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