Units September 20, 2024
Generational Links: An Exploration of Social & Systemic Injustice and Community Narratives in Baltimore and Beyond
State:
Grades:
This unit was created by ELA Educators at Baltimore City College High School, part of the 2021 cohort of The 1619 Project Education Network. It is designed for facilitation across approximately 5 five weeks, or 20 70-minute class periods. This is the English portion of an interdisciplinary IB unit.
Objectives and Outcomes
This unit follows the International Baccalaureate (MYP) curriculum and standards. It is tailored to high school students, but can be adjusted for various grade levels. Due to its instructional complexity and sensitive nature, this unit is best taught mid to late-year once students have learned foundational writing/reading skills, established relationships, and are prepared socially and emotionally. The case study is Baltimore, but the unit can be adjusted for other cities/states.
Purpose of Integration:
- Exploration of the connections between the past and present; reconstruction and its amendments
- Exploration of the effects and implications of The 1619 Project’s themes of race, privilege, etc. in Baltimore (can be adapted to focus on other cities/states)
- Turning research and oral history into a creative, theatrical piece
Key Concepts: Communities, Identities, Systems, Culture, Perspectives
Global Context: Fairness and Development
Statement of Inquiry:
Government policy directly and indirectly impacts communities and individuals, which can be discovered through data as well as personal narrative.
Inquiry Questions
Factual Inquiry Questions
- What are our civil liberties as humans/Americans?
- What is the process to become a U.S. citizen?
- What rights are we granted in the Bill of Rights?
- What makes a community?
- What factors influence a person’s identity?
Conceptual Inquiry Questions
- How are diction and characterization different in dramatic texts than novels, and why?
- The deeper issues and problems that underlie the unrest in Baltimore — poverty, racism, inequality, and injustice — affect each of us differently. How have these affected your own life? Your family & friends? Community?
- What are some barriers in your life that may prevent you from moving toward your own healing? How might we work towards building more trusting relationships that can help us support ourselves and others?
- How would you describe your relationship with Baltimore? (Your attitude toward the city, experiences here, etc.). Why do you think this is?
- How have government systems (education, healthcare, welfare, etc.) directly impacted local communities?
- Why do we have civil liberties?
- How is our legal system set up to protect us as citizens?
- Why have we seen injustice and inequities in our legal system throughout history?
Debatable Inquiry Questions
- How do people use storytelling to create social change?
- What do you see as your responsibility toward bringing about change in Baltimore? Is healing at the community level possible? How might we each contribute to it?
- Consider the terminology used to describe the events of April 2015. What does “uprising” imply? What does “riot” imply? Who might use the term uprising vs. riot and why?
- Should the U.S. legal system be reformed?
- Are the civil liberties granted to U.S. citizens implemented to the best extent?
Unit Overview
How are communities and personal identities directly and indirectly impacted by government systems? This unit focuses on themes of discrimination, systemic oppression, generational wealth, and oral history to discover the answers to this question. As part of this interdisciplinary unit, students use the tools of restorative narrative and storytelling to interrogate, consider, and critique the role and function of the US legal system. The final project task is a dramatic monologue based on an oral history that responds to one of the issues presented by The 1619 Project.
Skills covered during the unit include: analyzing literary devices & features of dramatic dialogue, critical reading strategies, source analysis, forming research questions & conducting research, exploring the methods of story collection, and self-reflection and evaluation.
Performance Task
Summative:
Write a monologue based on an oral history that responds to one of the issues presented by The 1619 Project or Notes From the Field, in the style of Anna Deavere Smith’s work. Reflect on the process of incorporating knowledge and skills from multiple classes through rationale and reflection.
There are three components to the Interdisciplinary Unit Summative:
- A Rationale (Criterion A, Evaluating):
Explain how you conducted your oral history and how you developed that into a monologue. Explain the policy or inequity that you focused on for your oral history, and why. Then explain which elements of dramatic monologue you want to emphasize, and how you did that. You will have an outline to help you with this process.
- An Oral History and Monologue (Criterion B, Synthesizing) & MYP Social Studies, Criterion B-Investigating)
- The oral history consists of recorded or written interviews conducted by students of their family, friends, and community members.
- The dramatic monologue will take the oral history as a draft. Students will then use the elements of dramatic monologue (diction, characterization, dialogue, perspective, and imagery) to turn the data and stories gathered from their oral history interviews/research into a written & performed (or recorded) monologue.
3. A Reflection (Criterion C, Reflecting)
This reflection will use the framework of a Personal Project reflection to determine what they learned from this project as an interdisciplinary endeavor.
Five week unit plan for teachers, including pacing, texts and multimedia resources, graphic organizers for student projects, and performance tasks for the unit. Download below, or scroll down to read the complete unit plan.
Facilitation Resources
IB Interdisciplinary Learning Assessment Criteria, MYP Years 1-5
Criterion A: Evaluating
In order to address real-world and contextual issues and ideas, students will be able to:
- Analyze disciplinary knowledge
- Evaluate interdisciplinary perspectives.
Criterion B: Synthesizing
In order to address real-world and contextual issues and ideas, students will be able to:
- Create a product that communicates a purposeful interdisciplinary understanding
- Justify how their product communicates interdisciplinary understanding.
Criterion C: Reflecting
In order to address real-world and contextual issues and ideas, students will be able to:
- Discuss the development of their own interdisciplinary learning
- Discuss how new interdisciplinary understanding enables action.
In this unit, students wrote monologues inspired by oral histories they conducted. Each monologue responds to key themes from The 1619 Project or Notes From the Field, allowing students to connect personal stories to broader social issues. This page showcases examples of students’ process assignments and their reflections on learning.
Student Sample 1: Researching the Impact of Title IX
Interviewee: My Mother
Research Question: How has Title IX impacted the amount of opportunity over the years for women to participate in scholastic athletic events, and programs.
...my interview helped me understand the affects that Title IX had on many marginalized groups, and that it altered many peoples lives...because of all the new opportunity.
Student a reflection
Student Sample 2: Researching the Martin Luther King, Jr. Era
It [my interview] explained how in that era discrimination was...bigger ...and had an effect on people - which is crazy because amendments like the 14th and 15th amendment had already been in place to protect people from being treated like that.
student b reflection
Student Sample 3: Researching the Impact of Marriage Equality Laws
Interviewee: My Family Friend
Research Question: How did your inability to get married because of the same sex marriage laws effect your life?
This interview, originally, shocked me because I didn’t fully realize that I was capable of communicating and understanding someone in the manner that I did in the interview...I hadn’t fully grasped just how vast and interesting his [my interviewee's] experiences were.
student c reflection
In this unit, students wrote monologues inspired by oral histories they conducted. Each monologue responds to key themes from The 1619 Project or Notes From the Field, allowing students to connect personal stories to broader social issues. This page showcases examples of students’ process assignments and final monologues.
Student Sample 1: Researching the Martin Luther King Era
My encounter as a young child with the police in elementary school was that officers were friendly and supposed to be there to protect you... You walk the hallways and they let you shake their hand and stuff but as I got older and years went by the police's strategy - I guess it changed.
Student A Monologue
Interviewee: My Great Grandmother
Research Question: How did Martin Luther King's Era inspire you and the city to stand up for your rights in the late 1960s?
Interview Transcript
Student Monologue
Student Sample 2: Researching the Impact of Title IX
...my interview helped me understand the affects that Title IX had on many marginalized groups, and that it altered many peoples lives...because of all the new opportunity.
student reflection
Interviewee: My Mother
Research Question:
How has Title IX impacted the amount of opportunity over the years for women to participate in scholastic athletic events, and programs?
Student 3 Sample: Researching the Impact of the Legalization of Same Sex Marriage
This helped me understand how amendments like the 14th amendment can make a difference in people’s lives.
student reflection
Interviewee: Family Friend
Research Question:
How did your inability to get married because of the same sex marriage laws effect your life?
Introduce your topic, research question and your source (your interviewee). Discuss why you were initially
interested in this particular topic.
The essential topic for my interview was Title IX, and the generational impact it had on leveling the playing field athletically, disregarding anyone's or race or sex. For extended information, I interviewed someone quite close to me, who also lived through the climax of Title IX, my mother.
student reflection
My topic for the interview was the effect of the same-sex marriage laws. My research question was “How was your life affected by the laws and restrictions of same-sex marriage. My interviewee’s name is Lee Davis. He is a close friend/Uncle of mine. I was interested in this topic because I have a passion and will to help people who are experiencing discrimination in any way. I choose to narrow down my topic to specifically gay marriage rights because Lee is a close friend of mine and I know that he has experienced that discrimination and I thought it would be cool to learn more about his experience.
student reflection
My topic was” Martin Luther king era” and my research question was How did Martin Luther King's Era inspire you and the city to stand up for your rights in the late 1960s?My source for this research question was my great grandma who is in her late 70’s and I wanted somebody who was born and alive during segregation and discrimination. I was interested in this topic because Martin Luther King was a big name to black people when it came to fighting for black people rights and freedom. And I wanted to know what did my interviewee hear and see during that time of civil rights movements and protest.
Student reflection
What was your initial reaction to the interview? Did anything surprise you? Did any of the things you learned
about the topic end up being proven true? What was difficult/easy about the interview process?
This interview, originally, shocked me because I didn’t fully realize that I was capable of communicating and understanding someone in the manner that I did in the interview. I knew that Lee had gone through a lot because he and I are good friends. However, I hadn’t fully grasped just how vast and interesting his experiences were.
student reflection
My reaction was shocking because my great grandma was in sharecropping which was similar to slavery because after a while , the sharecroppers owed money to the plantation owners they had to give them all of the money they made from cotton.
student reflection
What did you learn about your research question?
...my interview helped me understand the affects that Title IX had on many marginalized groups, and that it altered many peoples lives...because of all the new opportunity.
student reflection
This helped me understand how amendments like the 14th amendment can make a difference in people’s lives.
student reflection
It explain how in that era discrimination was a bigger back then and had an effect on people. Which is crazy because amendments like the 14th and 15th amendment had already been in place to protect people from being treated like that.
student reflection