Subject-Area Knowledge This unit takes students through a postcolonial and class reading of the rhetoric that the World Council in Ayn Rand’s Anthem uses to impact ideologies and hierarchize society. Then, it asks students to apply knowledge of how rhetoric is weaponized to oppress people to question how the popular rhetoric of the United States …
How do I mitigate biases in assessments? This question came to my mind frequently while faced with the challenging and rewarding task of teaching a standard, preAP curriculum to a culturally and linguistically diverse student population. My students became my biggest teachers in learning how to adapt standard assessments so that students with a variety …
Inquiry Units to Promote Student Learning We crafted our American Born Chinese Mini-Unit unit from a Backwards Design standpoint (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005), first considering the Essential Questions and Enduring Understandings that we wanted students to be able to answer and describe after participating in the unit activities and assessments. To ensure that the unit’s …
Contextual Lesson Design: Teaching Colorism and Media Analysis When I taught a student population of mostly White, middle-to-upper class learners, I often heard students use past-tense verbs when discussing concepts like White supremacy and racial oppression. The racism-is-in-the-past ideology that many White students held made the few Students of Color in the class feel uncomfortable …
I created this lesson plan with the assistance of a colleague, Olivia Williams, as a project for a Technology in Teaching and Learning class. The objective of the project was to demonstrate our abilities to purposefully integrate technology into our lesson plans to add value to our instruction, class assessments, and students’ learning.