So far this summer has been filled with things of which summer should consist: great reads, good PD, productive brainstorming sessions, sleeping later than normal, and time spent with friends and family. Amidst all of these things we have gotten a little behind with posting, so we decided to get back to our promise to you about our Refugee unit.
We previously mentioned that this unit came out of the requests of our 7th-grade students to build a unit just for them after they saw what our 8th-graders were doing with our WWII/Book Thief unit. Student engagement is the best encouragement to push harder and not quit, so we really had no choice but to meet their request.
Throughout the unit students worked extensively in groups in both English and Geography class to research, create, and collaborate on the themes presented. The set-up of this novel allowed us to easily connect with current and cultural events facing our own government and the governments of the world, while also discussing the social justice issues of immigration.
Refugee is a YA novel by Alan Gratz that was recently published that tells the story from three different perspectives, countries, and time periods. The experience of a Jewish refugee (Josef) from WWII Germany intermingles with the stories of both a girl (Isabel) escaping from Cuba in the 1990’s, and a modern day boy (Mahmoud) who is leaving Syria.
In geography this meant that I (Terri) had to toss out my rough plans for the remainder of the year in April and start over. I was not planning on focusing on the geographic locations of the novel, but saw this as an opportunity to deepen the learning of our students. The main projects from the unit for geography were a group Google slides presentation on immigration policy in which students researched an assigned time period and location corresponding with one of the character’s journeys, and an annotated mapping activity in which groups plotted the characters’ journeys, created a timeline, and summarized major plot events. This activity helped bridge the gap between the curriculum of the two classes. Along the way, the students learned relevant historical information on the events that motivated the asylum seeking of the characters.
One of the ways in which the seamlessness of this unit between the two subject areas was apparent came very early when working with the students. For example, in English I (Heather) had originally planned on my kids doing some work with the characters and plot, but I quickly realized that when Terri had the students plot their journeys on annotated maps, the plot details were being covered. We discussed the social justice aspect so much that the characters were talked about in depth in class, so my project went to more of a geography-themed one in the form of a culture project. Students worked in groups to teach their classmates the culture of the country from which their assigned character originated. We had students dress up, learn about new religions, bring samplings of food, and share literary and art from each country.
Finding this novel and realizing that Terri saw the potential of using it as well was perfect for English for several reasons. One is because I really wanted to teach a unit with her for the 7th graders even before they asked for it because I believe that the more connections kids can make, the more the lesson sticks in their brains. Since 7th moved to Geography this past year, we threw out our previous year’s cross-curricular because it no longer fit. Another is because of my long-held belief that YAL is a perfect medium for teaching social justice issues. The fact that the format of this novel gave us something more to talk about from a literary standpoint was almost trivial because the life-lessons and social justice issues were so engaging and important.
The final piece of the unit was a joint reflective research paper by the individual students. This required the students to use their knowledge from the unit on current immigration policy and to integrate their knowledge of the church’s teaching on immigration to formulate their own opinion on immigration policies as well as support those opinions with research. Since we are teachers in a Catholic school we felt that this component was crucial to pull together everything we try to teach: geography, social studies, English, church teaching, and critical thinking.
We attempted to present the paper as a PBL, giving them the scenario that they were each members of a group in Washington forming new laws on immigration, and they were responsible for explaining their views, while taking the Catholic Church’s teachings about immigration into account. Ultimately, we are not sure that this part went as smoothly as we might have hoped from a PBL standpoint, but the students did come up with some well thought out ideas on immigration. With such a quick turn around from concept to presentation to the students (about two weeks), there is certainly room for us to grow and improve the unit for the upcoming year. A greater focus on the PBL component for instance, but given the timing overall we feel this was a successful unit to help keep engagement and authentic learning high at a point in the year when many students begin to lose focus. Jumping right in and making this unit happen allowed us as educators not only to push ourselves, but to show the kids that we were working up to the end of the year right along with them. They watched us adjust assignments and re-evaluate things we originally wanted them to do, thus proving to them that failure is a part of our journey. It is our hope that they took much more away from this unit than we originally intended.
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