View Content #21850

This week, we depart from our normal activity to include an overview of a cross-curricular project that involves the world language classroom. The activity featured below was developed by a team of teachers at Hillsboro High School in Nashville, Tennessee through the support of the Center for Latin American Studies at Vanderbilt University in collaboration with the Center for Applied Second Language Studies.

Project team: Shelly Wilkinson (Mathematics SL/HL and Algebra II), Paul Troy (History of the Americas SL/HL), Emarie Elliott (Spanish SL/HL), and Adrian Bahan (We the People)

Social Justice in Latin America and the United States: Cross-Curricular Learning

Setting the Scene: Understand Social Justice Issues in Latin America

Step 1: All learners involved in the project begin by experiencing an “Entry Event”. This event is a viewing of the film Favela Rising (http://www.favelarising.com/), a documentary that follows a former drug trafficker who unites his community against local drug-related violence. After viewing the movie, the learners will be treated to a speaker from Vanderbilt University that is an expert in social justice issues in Brazil.

Step 2: In mathematics courses (Mathematics SL and Mathematics HL), learners will engage in statistical analysis of the data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project  (LAPOP) (http://www.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/) in order to identify social justice issues that merit more in-depth investigation. This investigation will be supplemented by gameplay of Parable of the Polygons (http://ncase.me/polygons/), a blog/game featured on CASLS’s Games2Teach blog (https://games2teach.uoregon.edu/learn/whats-new/).

Concurrent Learning Practices Across Disciplines

After completing Steps 1 and 2, learners will work on the following activities in their courses concurrently.

History of the Americas: Learners will explore civil rights issues throughout the Americas, paying special attention to analysis of primary and secondary sources. This exploration will lead learners to consider how historic trends with Civil Rights Issues in the Americas are connected to the modern world.

Spanish: Learners will use target-language sources to engage in simple analysis of the LAPOP data. They will read NCASE publications in Spanish to further explore the social justice issues that they have selected and will use the information that they find to craft texts (speeches, letters, and brochures) to inspire change regarding the issues at hand.

We the People: Learners will create a survey that is similar to the LAPOP survey to give to learners at Hillsboro High School.

Algebra II: Learners will advise the creation of the aforementioned survey and will engage in preliminary analysis of the data that the learners collect.

Final Presentations

In order to tie all of the courses together, learners will form teams according to social justice issue chosen and will work to create an artifact that raises community awareness (learners may create a social media campaign, write a song, or engage in any number of activities). They will then present their creations at a public event held at Vanderbilt University.

Notes: While most learners involved in the project are in at least three of the classes listed above, not all of them are. Given this reality, the activities crafted in each class were designed to create meaningful connections among subject areas but are not overly dependent on one another.