As a history teacher, relating the past to the present is integral to my success. If the name of this blog - and it's origin, Faulkner's quote - fail to acknowledge this point, perhaps the project below will.
For our (extremely short) unit on Europe, we will focus our attention on the ever-changing situation in Ukraine. There are a number of reasons for choosing Ukraine besides its relevance to the news, including its connections to the USSR, World Wars, and Russo-European relations, as well as protest movements, imperialism, and democracy in general. For our sake, however, the unraveling crisis/unrest/protest (whatever you prefer to call it) in Ukraine also provides an important opportunity to analyze perspective.
Our project is outlined below. We began by having our 8th graders read background articles on the conflict, as well as articles from sources chosen to intentionally reveal bias. Our students have been assigned groups based on three perspectives - pro-Russian Ukraine, pro-EU Ukraine, and international. Within those groups, they will create content that will ultimately become a website representing the conflict from their group's perspective. Within each group, there will be seven different assignments. While wee are assigning the groups, we are not assigning the specific assignments. This is purposeful so as to allow students to asset map and identify strengths and weaknesses within themselves and the group. The final product will be a digital website created by each group sharing their work - a kind of digital magazine from their perspective.
So what do you think? What are we missing? How would you change it? How could we do it better?
Our hope is that this project can be recycled and tweaked for years to come in order to analyze perspectives around whatever current protest movement is occurring - wherever that may be...
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