Artifact 6: Cultural Conflicts Project
Since returning from Winter Break in January, I've been struggling to make the standard World History curriculum relevant and accessible to my students. When we started with our Africa Unit in January, I found it difficult to connect this content to the lives of my students for them to develop an investment in learning the material. In my mind, the most successful part of the unit was having the students act as griots to tell stories from their past to the class and share their culture, as well as practice their oral-speaking skills [click to view samples]. While I enjoyed getting to know my students better, and I think this project helped to build a sense of classroom community, it did not promote content learning in the classroom. With our unit on the Middle Ages, we had more time to delve into the content and develop my students' knowledge of the people who lived in Europe at the time, what the different roles, and lives in society were like, and have a deeper understanding of the values of the period.
Inevitably, I still felt frustrated. When discussing the Crusades, many of my students did not feel a connection to the conflict and I couldn't say that I blamed them. While I have both Muslim and Christian student in my class, the conflict happened in a place foreign to all of them and long enough ago where most students did not feel a personal connection or develop a stance surrounding it. In one class, however we started to get at some of the enduring understandings of the unit for the first time. One student, T, asked during lecture, "Ms. June, Muslims and Christians are not that different yes?" After T asked this question, I wrote Islam, Christianity, and Judaism on the board and said, "All three religions believe in one god, what is that belief called?" A couple of my students could recall the term "monotheism" from our World Religions unit when we came to the collective conclusion that these three religions are more similar than we typically think. Though many of my students could not articulate it, I felt that we got at one of our enduring understandings for the unit, "Culture is both a unifying and divisive force" on that day.
Inevitably, I still felt frustrated. When discussing the Crusades, many of my students did not feel a connection to the conflict and I couldn't say that I blamed them. While I have both Muslim and Christian student in my class, the conflict happened in a place foreign to all of them and long enough ago where most students did not feel a personal connection or develop a stance surrounding it. In one class, however we started to get at some of the enduring understandings of the unit for the first time. One student, T, asked during lecture, "Ms. June, Muslims and Christians are not that different yes?" After T asked this question, I wrote Islam, Christianity, and Judaism on the board and said, "All three religions believe in one god, what is that belief called?" A couple of my students could recall the term "monotheism" from our World Religions unit when we came to the collective conclusion that these three religions are more similar than we typically think. Though many of my students could not articulate it, I felt that we got at one of our enduring understandings for the unit, "Culture is both a unifying and divisive force" on that day.
Many of my students come from places living in conflict or recovering from recent conflict. From their stories during our Africa unit, we learned that a few students are Bhutanese refugees. Others come from war-stricken Africa and still more had relatives murdered in Pol Pot's genocide. These are the conflicts that my students have either lived through, or have a received first-hand accounts of from their loved ones. In the constructing the guidelines for the project, I hoped to give them as much freedom as possible to explore the conflicts that were meaningful to them, and in a way that they felt the most comfortable discussing this conflict. I gave my students examples from the five major continents to choose from and many chose conflicts close to home (which is what I hoped for). While focus always seems to stray when my students have the chance to use the computer cart, I noticed that the majority of my students bought into the assignment quickly after the initial day of research and choosing topics. Allowing my students to explore the enduring understandings in a way that is relevant and relatable to them, has eased some of my fears that the World History curriculum, despite my best efforts, is too intangible to promote long-term, higher-order learning [click to view Cultural Conflicts samples].