Ethnic Studies Unit 8

Essential Questions:

• How do I express my ethnicity and culture?

• How does ethnicity and culture influence my personal identity?

Texts:

• TBD

Topics:

• Revising & editing your research paper

  • clarity

  • relevance

  • tone & style

  • organization & structure

  • cohesion

  • capitalization, punctuation, spelling & grammar

• Designing/developing a creative expression of your learning 

• Interviewing

  • types of interviews

  • techniques

  • example interviews

  • preparing for interviews (interviewer and interviewee)

• Publishing academic and creative writing

• Prepare for the end-of-year conference/celebration

• Portfolio review and reflection

Unit Skills: 

• Revise your research essay:

  • Review structure and organization of paragraphs, and revise as needed.

  • Identify the topic sentence and supporting details for each of your body paragraphs; revise as needed.

  • Improve vague, clumsy, and confusing writing to gain clarity and/or avoid redundancy when editing a text. 

  • Clarify words, phrases and ideas that are unclear by improving word choice, correcting misused terms, and/or explaining in more detail. 

  • Review your in-text citations and Works Cited section; add citations as needed.

  • Revise words or phrases to be consistent with the style and tone in a text

  • Determine relevancy of a paragraph or sentence in terms of the focus of the essay.

  • Determine logical order of sentences in a text when editing/revising

• Proofread and self-correct errors in capitalization, punctuation, spelling and grammar including:

  • Pronoun usage

  • Verb usage (tense, subject-verb agreement)

  • Comma usage

  • Sentence structure (simple, compound, complex)

  • Parallel structure

  • Misplaced/dangling modifiers

  • Transition words

• Analyze and discuss technical (rhetorical/literary/craft) and conceptual (ideas/information) aspects of a classmate’s research paper and creative project.

• Create a literary or artistic work inspired by your research. 

• Facilitate critical and in-depth conversations inspired by research and creative works.

• Produce an interview (written, audio or video) in which you and a classmate discuss the information and ideas that inspired your creative piece.

• Contribute to a class publication and celebration that showcases the learning and creativity that you and your classmates have accomplished.

• Reflect on your experience in Ethnic Studies class this year, noting successes and skills and knowledge gained, favorite activities and assignments, challenges, themes, questions, growth, and future opportunities.

Enduring Understandings:

• Contemporary issues and ideas are influenced by historical events, current events, opportunities, concerns, and ongoing conversations.

• Examining an issue or idea from multiple perspectives acknowledges diverse points of view and honors the complexity of the issue or idea.

• We can analyze information by sequencing, categorizing, identifying cause-and-effect relationships, comparing and contrasting, finding the main idea, summarizing, making generalizations, making predictions, drawing inferences, and drawing conclusions.

• Critical thinking involves complexity, multiple perspectives, attention to detail, understanding of context, vision, insight and discernment.

• Creative and artistic works can provide opportunities for learning and discourse around an issue or idea.

Formative Assessment(s):

• Journal Writing

• Discussion (in-person or online) - Reflections

• Notes / Annotations - interview preparation for cultural conversations interview

Summative Assessment(s):

• Arts & Cultural Conversations Interview - partner with a classmate; in an essay, podcast or video, interview each other about your research and creative project, discussing what you learned and the thoughts and decisions that went into your creative piece - success criteria

  • Prerequisites: 

    • Final Draft of Research paper (first draft was due at the end of Unit 6; conference, revisions and editing during Unit 7; final draft due at the start of Unit 8)

    • Develop a creative work (poem, artwork, photograph, audio recording, song, short film, etc.) inspired by your conversation

  • Interview Process: 

    • brainstorm initial questions for interviewing your partner

    • read/review/take notes on their research essay and other resources they recommend; do your own research to learn more about the topics and ideas they bring up 

    • develop at least 5 critical (well-informed, detailed) questions for the interview

    • conduct the interview

    • review and edit material, produce final paper, podcast or video

• Publication in class literary magazine - success criteria

• Final Celebration - Ethnic Studies Celebration Day? - artistic performance (music, dance, drama, poetry/spoken word), visual art display, culinary dish or drink, cultural games, decorations (Date TBD) 

• Digital Writing Portfolio - in Google Drive - Review & Final Reflection - rubric