What Is Home?

Objectives:

Students will be able to:

• Analyze text and images in order to synthesize information and reflect on the question: What is home?
• Compare and contrast their ideas of home with the "home" portrayed in the media, Finding Home.
• Evaluate and revise their ideas and connections to this topic by discussing the details in the text and images.

Note: This lesson plan was created during United Photo Industries' Fall 2017 Teacher PD Day, a program that brings teachers and artists together to develop lesson plans inspired by Photoville exhibitions. The "What Is Home?" lesson first appeared on the United Photo Industries education resources. Click here to access a downloadable version of the lesson plan and an accompanying image bank. 

Warm-up:

1. Deposit a set of prompts to your students and ask them to jot down their responses on post-its.

• What is home?
• What is essential to home?
• If you lose that thing that is essential, how do you feel?
• What does it look like when you don't have a home?

2. Turn and talk: Pair students up in partners and small groups to discuss their responses. Ask students to look for common themes and differences amongst their responses.

3. Tell your students that you will work together as a class to come up with a definition of "home." Ask each group to share a few of their findings. Document these findings on the board, grouping similar themes together.

4. Based on this class discussion, ask each student to write a 1–2 sentence definition of home.

5. Frame the topic by sharing, "We're going to be looking closely at people who have had to leave their homes."

6. Optional discussion topics:

• Reasons for loss of home locally and globally.
• Definitions of "refuge" and "refugee."
• Is it possible to feel "at home" in a place that is not home?

Introducing the Resources and Activity:

1. Select one or two images from Finding Home to practice a See/Think/Wonder inquiry with students.

2. Provide an excerpt of the Finding Home articles. Have students respond to the following questions independently and prepare to share their responses with the class.

• What ideas about "home" emerge?
• Point to where and how the text does this.

3. Direct students to the Finding Home Instagram account (@findinghome). Ask them to choose one image that reflects "home" to them. Have students respond to the following See/Think/Wonder independently and prepare to share their responses with the class.

• What do you see?
• What do you think about that?
• What does it make you wonder?

Reflection:

Ask students to reflect and write a response to the activity using the following prompts:

• After reading the text and viewing the images, how has your definition of home changed?
• What in the text and the images changed your thinking?

Extension Activities:

Option 1.
Use Instagram Stories to document your own "home" experiences for a day. Capture 15 moments that define your home. Share your Instagram feeds with us by taking a picture and emailing it to [email protected].

Option 2.
If Instagram and phones are not available to every student, provide square post-its and ask them to draw scenes of their "home." Display in a collection to create a class Instagram gallery.

Option 3.
Discuss this topic locally and connect this to policy.

• Who is finding home in our communities?
• How can we help?

Option 4.
Arrange a free Skype session with the journalists who reporting "Finding Home" through the Pulitzer Center.