I think that a good way to teach about power, authority, and governance is to just be willing to have difficult conversations in the classrooms with you students. In the past year, I have been able to have very hard and in depth conversations with my students during student teaching as well as my basketball players. We have talked about topics such as the Fergesun, MO riots, police brutality, Baltimore, MD riots, and even here locally we talked about the pros and cons to the Confederate flag at the state house here in Columbia. In EDSE 729 we also were involved in a local global connections project in which we were able to study the historical structures of power in Columbia, SC as it relates to the Civil Rights Movement in 1963. Personally, I would love to assign this exact same activity to my students.
This spring I was teaching an AP World History class. The unit that I taught was period 5 1750-1900 in which involves the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Strand VI says that learners should come to understand how different governmental systems handle conflict and keep order. I chose to give a particular lesson within this unit that was a flipped classroom lesson. In the lesson, students are asked to examine various documents from both the French and American revolutions that spoke to the individual rights of men and how those rights would be upheld. Students really love watching "Crash Course" videos on most topics so the flipped classroom also has a couple of these as well. The document which I have posted below, calls for the students to answer 48 questions on these governmental systems and to compare and contrast them as well. Based on the discussion that this flipped classroom generated in the next class period, I believe that one of the biggest lessons that students learned about history is that it can be questioned and analyzed through multiple lenses while keeping in mind that power and who holds power sometimes influences more than we thought. For example, when reading the Declaration of Independence and reading about how "all men are created equal" while also examining the fact that about 30% of the male population at the time that this quote was written down were enslaved African men forced the students to ask questions like "So, who is really created equal?" The answer was those with the power, meaning those who owned property at the time.
This spring I was teaching an AP World History class. The unit that I taught was period 5 1750-1900 in which involves the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Strand VI says that learners should come to understand how different governmental systems handle conflict and keep order. I chose to give a particular lesson within this unit that was a flipped classroom lesson. In the lesson, students are asked to examine various documents from both the French and American revolutions that spoke to the individual rights of men and how those rights would be upheld. Students really love watching "Crash Course" videos on most topics so the flipped classroom also has a couple of these as well. The document which I have posted below, calls for the students to answer 48 questions on these governmental systems and to compare and contrast them as well. Based on the discussion that this flipped classroom generated in the next class period, I believe that one of the biggest lessons that students learned about history is that it can be questioned and analyzed through multiple lenses while keeping in mind that power and who holds power sometimes influences more than we thought. For example, when reading the Declaration of Independence and reading about how "all men are created equal" while also examining the fact that about 30% of the male population at the time that this quote was written down were enslaved African men forced the students to ask questions like "So, who is really created equal?" The answer was those with the power, meaning those who owned property at the time.