This unit was created by ELA and Social Studies Educators at the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women, part of the 2021 cohort of The 1619 Project Education Network. It is designed for facilitation across 17 55 minute class periods.
Objectives & Outcomes
- Students will analyze how writers and artists make deliberate craft choices in order to convey a message about a specific topic and/or theme.
- Students will create a personal argument in which they explore the meaning of America, its flag, and their relationship to each.
- Students will research and explain how parts of their identity and culture have contributed to historical and contemporary American society.
- Students will engage in Socratic Seminars where they will clearly explain their ideas and expand their understanding of Black people’s contributions to America.
- Students will understand how the enslavement of Africans in America was the impetus of capitalism and produced profound wealth and power for the United States.
Unit Overview
In this unit, students will explore the meaning of America and how the contributions of Black Americans have helped build this country and shape American culture.
Students will read and analyze Nikole Hannah Jones’ “The Idea of America,” photographs and images from the Pulitzer Award-winning 1619 Project, as well as Childish Gambino’s music video “This Is America” to examine the contributions of Black people to American society and understand how the enslavement of Black people has impacted and shaped American institutions and culture. Through Socratic seminars and writing tasks, students will engage with each piece to analyze how the creators make specific craft choices to convey a message about a particular topic and/or theme.
Students will complete the unit by creating their own personal essay in which they explore their own relationship with America, its history, and flag. Students will research how their communities have historically contributed to American society. They will incorporate their own historical illusions, such as Hannah-Jones’s, to highlight how Black people have contributed to America.
Performance Tasks
Formative Tasks
Through these tasks, students analyze other essays, songs, and pieces of art to understand how artists use rhetorical techniques to convey an overall argument or meaning.
- Rhetorical Analysis Paragraph
- PAPA square
- Socratic Seminar
Culminating Task
In the culminating task, students move from evaluating other writing to creating original works. They will utilize the essays, songs, and artworks from the unit as mentor texts for developing an essay that centers their own perspective of America.
- My Idea of America: A personal essay in which students express what America means to them and what they see as their community’s contributions to American society.
Three week unit plan for teachers, including pacing, texts and multimedia resources, and performance tasks for the unit. Download below, or scroll down to read the facilitation resources.
Facilitation Resources
1619 Project Resources | Print Broadsheet “The Idea of America” by Nikole Hannah-Jones |
Pulitzer Center Resources | Images from The 1619 Project |
Images | Images of American Flags Titus Kaphar “Beyond The Myth Of Benevolence” (2014 painting) |
Music Videos | “This Is America” by Childish Gambino |
Common Core Standards (ELA)
Determine an author's point of view or purpose in a text in which the rhetoric is particularly effective, analyzing how style and content contribute to the power, persuasiveness or beauty of the text.
Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas, concepts, and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.