GLOBALIZED UNIT AND LESSON PLANS
Scroll down to see examples of my own teaching that emphasizes global learning, explains how each lesson and unit follows the global education matrices, and how I have integrated digital resources to enhance and transform the lesson. My Globalized Unit Plan from the Fulbright course also demonstrates using Project-Based Learning to give students the freedom and agency to develop their own passion towards changing and connecting to the world. I will continue to add lessons that you may steal, change, or use for inspiration!
INTERNATIONAL CHOICE BOOK ASSIGNMENT
Every year, I set aside around 20-30 minutes on Fridays for sustained silent reading. Recently, I have noticed a real emphasis on American and British literature at my school. While not a criticism (I love teaching American authors), I thought I would create an opportunity for everyone to read and connect with writers outside of America or England. Students read two authors throughout the year with a presentation at the end of each semester. The only parameters are that the author comes from outside the United States or England, otherwise, students are given the opportunity to discover texts that speak to them, that broaden their understanding of and connection to the world around them.
Investigating the World and Recognizing Perspectives
By allowing students to choose their own reading and provide resources to discover new titles and authors, students investigate the world, looking online and going to the library for recommendations of authors outside the US. More so, the assignment asks students to research the authors, their background, and the setting of the novel. The presentation asks that students continue investigating throughout the reading. Students must also research the history and context of the novel and the author. While reading itself I believe is an act of empathy, and thus an act of recognizing perspectives, I think that asking students to put themselves in the context of a novel fosters this recognition.
Communicate Ideas and Take Action
The presentation asks that students deliver a presentation to the class on what they have gained and have been thinking about while reading their book. Unlike a book report, students are asked to focus on 1-2 ideas that they believe the novel addressed, to provide the class with a "take" on what the novel might be trying to tell us, what it might say about being human. The final parto f the presentation requires students to consider a call to action, ie. to ask themselves, "What is this book calling me to do? I will I take action?" Students answer this question in the presentation, each student at least stating a concrete plan to take their learning outside of the classroom.
Digital Resources
For this assignment, students mostly relied on google slides for their presentation. While this may not seem like much, a commonly used, if not overused, tool in most districts, I like to take this opportunity to give my own book talk, modeling some o the ways to use google slides that goes beyond a simple slideshow. "Did you know that you can create animations? Have you ever tried making your presentation more interactive? Have you ever used Peardeck?" I will say to my students.
I also like to begin this project by offering a number of online book list resources, such as the NYT globetrotter list, giving students a head start to finding something they'll love!
Takeaways and Aha's
One point of the digital resources I want to get across in this section is that we often assume students already know everything about technology, but the truth is, like everything, like we should know from our own learning, the things we know, we know because someone taught them to us. I think one way of negotiating technology is to not assume that all technology is worthwhile, that all lessons need the assistance of technology, but to learn a lot about the online tools you do decide to use, so that you can teach your students all the ways they might transform their lessons.
I also want to touch on the importance of encouraging choice reading, and getting students to read as much as possible outside of school. I remember being a reader in high school and struggling to find time to read, before there were literally infinite things to watch and play all the time. If we want students to become better readers and writers, we need to encourage them to read and write more.
WORLD RECIPE PUZZLE AND FIND
This is a lesson plan for students in my English Language Development classes. A major goal in these classes is to avoid teaching the English language by only referencing British and American culture. While it is often fun, enriching, and useful to learn about US culture, it is imperative that students celebrate all the cultures in the classroom and are able to share their own knowledge and experiences with the class. These classes should be at the forefront of global education, literally embodying our connectedness, how much we can learn from each other. This lesson celebrates our connection with food using the Global Table Adventure website as a resource. In this lesson, I cut up 9 different recipes printed from the site and made 3 different sets with 3 recipes each. Students raced to put them back together, then used the website to try to find the recipe’s country of origin. In the process, students explored many different counties and recipes. At the end, students researched the countries and shared a few facts about each one to the class.
Investigating the World and Recognizing Perspectives
The objective of this lesson was to encourage students to explore the recipes of different countries, connecting to each other through the great universal of eating. My students love to talk about food and this allowed students to share the new experiences and tastes of Portland, OR while learning about the dishes that bind us together. STudents made inferences about reasons why a certain food was used, then researched climate and history for answers. While food is so connecting, we often use it to separate ourselves from others, dismissing certain cuisine as gross or weird. Through these discussions, students must openly grapple with these assumptions, thinking about the ways that different cultures respond to diets from their ouwn country and assumptions about the diets of America.
Communicating Ideas and Taking Action
Students communicate ideas through the sharing of their own experiences of food, the recipes and takeaways from their research, and ultimately creating their own recipes that share part of themselves with the class. Students celebrate the connections they have with other countries, and share their experiences of being otherized or otherizing through food and culture. This is also our connection to taking action, the posted recipes coming out of this discussion in which we challenge hierarchical thinking that reveals itself when we decide which cultures we celebrate and those we ignore or exoticize.
Digital Resources
This lesson relied heavily on the Global Table Adventure website. Before the lesson, I chose 9 different countries that were not already represented in the classroom. I printed out the recipes and cut them into puzzle pieces, making sure to remove countries of origin or other information that would give it away. Once students had completed their puzzles, they had to race to find the 3 countries they were from, exploring the site on their own. Students then used basic search engines to research countries. I found that the Global Table Adventure also wrote the recipes in an easy to read format that allowed students to develop their own recipes based on the template. I was also able to focus on practicing imperatives and giving directions among a substantial amount of cooking vocabulary to support students English development. I made Quizlet and Kahoot lists to practice the vocabulary.
Takeaways and Aha's
I really want to emphasize the need to celebrate the experiences, histories, families, and full richness of our students' lives in the classroom. I think there is often a desire to keep things simple in the classroom, thinking about food even as something easy and universal to connect with students. While this is true, I think the best lessons push students further, simple lessons about suddenly about food turning into discussions of discrimination and othering. The lesson that follows this series focuses on food deserts, the fact that millions of Americans do not have adequate access to real, fresh, or affordable food. If we are really trying to have our students take action, then we must be willing to explore more serious issues. I love talking to my students about the dishes they love, but I remember more the connections they made to food shortages, drought, and inequity.
RESEARH PROJECT ON INTERNATIONAL BEAUTY STANDARDS
For this assignment, I teamed up with another teacher in the Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms fellowship to both globalize a lesson and use technology to connect and share information between classes in another state. This lesson acted as a bridge between a personal narrative unit in which we read Morgan Jerkins’ essay “Monkeys Like You” from her book This Will Be My Undoing about the clear messages she received as a child that told her to be white was to be beautiful, to be black was to be ugly. Following this unit, I begin reading Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye, that explores these themes in more depth, the generational consequences of these cruel standards. I wanted students to think about where our ideas of beauty come from, how they are created, manipulated, and spread. Through this lesson, we discuss the way American and European standards have been marketed around the world, the ways that companies that sell beauty products, even those embracing the Body Positivity movement, perpetuate racism, sexism, and body shaming through their advertising. Lastly, through the presentations, and the following discussions, I want students to understand that beauty is truly subjective, that even what is considered to be healthy in the medical and science community is often driven by bias.
Investigating the World and Recognizing Perspectives
This research project asks students to directly investigate the world and recognize perspectives, having them choose a country to research, then find articles, videos, testimonials, interviews, and books that give students an understanding of what different cultures consider attractive and why. While many students make the connection that countries have been greatly influenced by American culture, others notice that history, climate, status, religion, and the local popular culture all influence these perceptions, just as occurs in our own culture. Since students are encouraged to find videos of people talking about living up to these standards, many of which can be found on Youtube, students listen to the ways that young people feel they have to conform and struggle to be accepted. Many students in my class talked about feeling solidarity with these students, having the same doubts about their own appearance.
Communicating Ideas and Taking Action
Students compiled their research into presentations to show to the class. They recorded them on flipgrid, which was shared with the class in California. The California class who were in middle school, made similar videos about their own feelings about what they are supposed to look like, what they are told is beautiful. While at the end of the lesson, I asked my students to consider means of taking action based on their takeaways from the research, I found that simply connecting with a class of younger students, knowing that they would be presenting to these kids, gave my high school students a sense of purpose, that they wanted to teach these kids that they could be proud of the way they looked, of who the are.
Digital Resources
Flipgrid was the main technology used for this lesson. While students used slides as well to make their presentations, I felt like this was my chance to enhance and transform the way I have done presentations. If I am being honest, presenting has always been a struggle in my classes and I have often wondered how much students get out of it. Many students in my school have real anxiety about speaking in public, and once in front of the class, they have to battle between urges of wanting to do well, but also wanting to seem, well, cool (really a synonym for beautiful and attractive). While many teachers get their students to make wonderful presentations, I have found that you need to have very high standards, and be pretty brutal about grading and critique. I have found that while this pushes many students to do their best work, it allows other students to fall through cracks, never fully able to show what they know. Lastly, they take a while, usually spending a whole class sitting through presentations. Having my students record their presentation helped with many of these problems. Although they weren’t gone, students still were nervous to record themselves, some students still could have taken it more seriously, it minimized these issues, and allowed for higher expectations and real critique that wasn’t witnessed by the entire class.
Takeaways and Aha's
Again, though I have separated these lessons into Global Education and Abolitionist Teaching, part of doing this work is that both are pretty much constantly at work in my mind and my planning. This is a global lesson because it asks students to research other countries with expectations drawn from the global matrices, but it also asks students to draw conclusions about the way racism and body shaming operate in our country, and the implications of living in a connected world. This lesson also draws together texts by black authors that, yes, do directly and honestly discuss the messages they receive about being ugly, explain the deliberate history of these messages, but ultimately reject the propaganda of white supremacy and celebrate their beauty.
GLOBALIZED UNIT PLAN: PBL POETRY UNIT
As part of our fellowship, we were required to develop a globalized unit plan that embodied the teachings of Global Education models. I had already been working on a poetry unit that I had been planning for the fall semester, but decided to make it into a global unit and take much, much more time with it. I also used the opportunity to try my first full Project-Based Learning Unit. While I employ a lot of PBL in the classroom, often as part of smaller research projects like the above International Beauty Standards assignment, this was the first time I gave my students a long term project in this style. Students were given agency to discover and create, apply the skills and tools provided to them while also learning to learn on their own. In this project, students write a book of poetry that follows a general theme based on a United Nation Sustainable Development Goal or another issue that draws their passion. Students also analyze three poems as part of the project, at least one of their own, a poem of another student (given anonymously), and a poet introduced in class. Finally, they write a This I Believe essay explaining the reasons for choosing their topic. Students are given a packet at the beginning of the project with instructions, the different poetry forms, models, prompts, and vocabulary.
Investigating the World
This project asks students to investigate the world through the various poets I introduce to them in class and exploring the poem forms that include Vietnamese, Afghani, Japanese, Korean, Mexican, Guatemalen, Lakota, and Mvskoke poetry as well as some of the European forms more commonly taught in American classrooms. Students not only learn about these poets, but actually explore new ways of thinking by expressing their ideas in forms traditionally meant for languages other than English. In the last years I have embarked on much more language learning, practicing Spanish for years now and just beginning to learn a little Arabic for this upcoming trip. I believe that learning a language is not simply matching words and symbols, but discovering a whole new way of attending to the world. These investigations provide a pathway to see the way setting limitations and structure to our writing can open up new possibilities in our own thinking.
Recognizing Perspectives and the 3 Y’s
While some of the ways that students investigate the world and recognize perspectives are similar in this project, especially in the exploration of poets and poetry from other countries, I want to emphasize the way the 3 Y’s come into play in this project. After I ask students to choose a few UNSDGs that speak to them, the first lesson asks students to write on the 3 Y’s, either on a single SDG or on multiple since oftentimes they intersect. I think this combination really asks students to think about their connection between what draws them to this issue and how it affects everyone in the world. While students do investigate the world through experimenting with different forms, it is the process of taking the research and expressing it personally, locally, and globally that allow students to see the way we are linked, the fact that our ideas, our solutions are not the only ones that exist, that we have a responsibility to learn from others including indigenous communities that have lived in concert with the planet for thousands of years. Many of the optional prompts ask students to listen to stories and empathize with people outside of their day to day life.
Communicating Ideas
Students spend much of their time compiling research, prompts, and personal writing into 12 poems and a This I Believe essay that explores an important issue that connects them with the world. Students explain and illustrate the reasons they care about the issue, how it affects them personally, the effects of people and land all over the world, and a vision for a better world. Since students are given so much freedom in their choice and the range of ways they can express themselves, the final products were not only works of great beauty and wisdom, but a real calling for readers to wake up and take action.
Taking Action
As a final requirement of this project, I asked students to directly find a way to use this project to take action on their chosen UNSDG. Students were given few, arguably annoyingly few, parameters. I told students that to get the points (5 points all or nothing) they needed to use their poetry in some way to take action. Students were allowed to band together, even as a whole class or multiple classes, or they could do something individually or in a small group. As long as they took this work out of the classroom to push for real change, they met the requirement. Admittedly, this project was almost finished when COVID forced our school to shut down and the rest of the year to go online. In the stress of it all, I quietly took away the graded portion, wanting to alleviate the anxiety of such a great change. Many students, however, did take it to heart and posted poems, delivered them to family members and friends in an attempt to change minds and used them as part of organizing they were already involved in.
Digital Resources - Padlet and Flipgrid
Padlet and Flipgrid both proved to be extremely useful in this unit. In fact, I basically began integrating Padlet into all my students, a great tool to quickly provide students information or vocabulary, allow for written discussions, and mostly for the purposes of this unit make it easy to post poetry and receive feedback anonymously. Students were admittedly nervous to share their poetry and students often struggle to give prolonged feedback on a single piece. By having students post their poems anonymously and requiring students to comment on at least 2 poems, students were able to receive feedback from multiple sources, and more importantly, felt their works were praised and celebrated. I also wanted students to practice reading poetry. They were allowed to choose their own poem, or a poem that spoke to them from class or their own research. Once again, this technology allowed them to read with more confidence and cut down on class time. Many students were excited for the opportunity to share their poetry, especially in a format where they could practice to reach their best performance.
UNSDGs
I used the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to help students focus their research and issue. While many students already had an idea of what they wanted to do, many of which fell into the goals anyway, students who were clearly more unsure were able to lean on the UNSDGs for support. More so, the UNSDG website gave students a great jumping off point to begin their research, thinking about the aspects of their chosen topic that would make it into their poetry. I also appreciated the opportunity to discuss the goals potentially left out of the UNSDG’s. Many students in the class wanted to write about racial justice and wondered why it wasn’t explicitly made into a goal. It gave us a chance to discuss the ways that biases come up everywhere, even by those most well-meaning, trying their best to make the world a better place.
Project-Based Learning
As stated above, this was my first attempt at a full Project-Based Learning Experience. While initially it was difficult to relinquish control, still spending too much time each class introducing a new poet, once I allowed my students to research, write, edit, share, and revise, I found myself transfixed by the focus and energy that went into this project. It was clear from the final works that many of these works demonstrated the most energy, time, and care that my students had ever put into an assignment of mine. I developed the unit using the PBL unit plan template, which helped me move away from writing daily lesson plans and give students the freedom to explore, discover, and create their own art, learning about form and function by doing and performing. One of the main preparations was actually the packet, putting the weeks of lesson development into creating an instructional packet with color-marked examples and prompts to assist them on their literary journeys.
Takeaways and Aha’s
Part of Global Education and Abolitionist Teaching is a constant examination of our own biases, how they appear in our teaching, and the messages they send. In reflecting on this project, I noticed how heavily I focused on European poetry forms, even with my conscious desire to want to disrupt American and European centered pedagogy. In my original packet, I asked students to write 2 different forms of sonnet, a villanelle, a sestina, a reverse cento, and a paradelle, all of which are English, Italian, or American. Since many of the examples I chose I had written previously, already dedicating many hours to writing examples of poetry, I failed to consider that I had learned only European styles of poetry in my own education, thus repeating the same mistakes. What message does it send to students when there is a single example of poems from whole continents while multiple examples of British and European poetry? I would say it reinforces the message that contributions from white civilizations should be valued more highly than others, that even if we include art from places distant from our own, it is really just an empty celebration of our own progressive values. I plan to be more cognizant of this failing the next time around, changing these requirements and introducing and greater multitude of forms.