Overview of Our Project

The Civil Rights Movement encompasses over a century of American history. For the purpose
of our Interdisciplinary Collaborative Project (ICP) we focused on a very important decade in time,
from the mid-1950s-mid1960s, when the movement, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to the
forefront of Americas consciousness. Due to the content involved we are collaborating between 8
th

grade U.S. History and 8
th
grade ELA. Our purpose in social studies is to transform our students into
historians, as opposed to dumping the knowledge of this crucial moment in American history onto
their laps. In ELA the novel, The Watsons Go to Birmingham1963, by Christopher Paul Curtis, will be
the vehicle through which the students will experience an overlap of concepts from history class
while at the same time learning some valuable skills to assist them in enhancing their metacognitive
interaction with text. Both content areas will provide students the opportunity to explore their
multiliteracies due to the methods by which they will search for information and the tools they will use
to express what they have learned.
The social studies unit will begin with a web quest that will allow students to work in 4 groups.
For each day of the unit we will incorporate vocabulary. For days that students will be viewing
YouTube clips or audio, we will pre-teach vocabulary by giving students the words ahead of time. As
students accumulate words they will be added to the word wall. While in their groups, the students
will be given the task to answer various questions as means for us to see what their current knowledge
on the topic is, as well as catch them up to our year of study, which is 1963. In the web quest, there
are seven events that range from the year 1954 and continue up until 1960. There is also a choose
your own path event where the students are free to choose an event to research and answer
questions about. According to Suzanne M. Miller, Whats essential is performance knowledge-
knowing how to find, gather, use, communicate, and imagine new ways of envisioning assemblages
of knowledge (Miller, 2008). This activity provides the tools for students to use to access the desired
information but it is up to the students to find, organize and evaluate the information.
The rest of the lesson sketches focus specifically on the year 1963, which coincides with the
novel, The Watsons Go to Birmingham1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis, which they will be reading in
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English language arts. These multimodal lessons use a combination of video clips, audio clips,
primary source documents, and PowerPoint to convey necessary information, as well as, inspire
students to interact with history as opposed to just passively receiving direct instruction from the
teacher. The initial lesson will be about Letters from Birmingham Jail. The following lesson will inform
students of the infamous bombing of the 16
th
Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that will use 1
st

hand account interviews. The final multiday lesson will take the students through the planning and
preparation of the March on Washington culminating with a creative writing activity based on Dr.
Kings famous, I Have a Dream Speech.
Gloria Jacobs warns against narrowly defining assessment (2013). With that in mind, students
will be assessed in a multimodal fashion by being asked to participate in discussions, create their own
speeches, work sheets, an essay, and a presentation using any format of choice based on
information they expand on from the original web quest assignment, as well as, in class learning. Our
final assessment will consist of three components, a visual/multimedia portion, a paper describing
their visual, and an oral presentation. Students will assist the teacher in generating a 4-point rubric
that the students will use to rate the presenters. This will count for 10-15% of the presentation grade
and will keep students attentive when not presenting.
The ELA unit will coincide with the social studies unit and at times intersect. Specifically, we will
touch on the 16
th
Street Church bombing in Birmingham, AL on September 15, 1963. We will use the
Spike Lee film, 4 Little Girls (1997). In addition, there are other topics such as
segregation/integration, and we will also use Dr. Kings I Have a Dream speech to discuss literary
devices such as, tone, repetition, allusion, simile, and metaphor.
The unit will begin by reinforcing the 7 Habits of Readers and as we work our way through
the novel students will be asked to incorporate the 7 Habits by having them respond to the
literature in various ways. Students will sometimes be asked to make predictions, the will be asked to
make inferences, they will be encouraged to ask questions and then we will follow through and see if
predictions and inferences were accurate, or if not, what happened. In response to reading the text,
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which will sometimes take the form of shared read aloud, other times we may listen to a CD
rendition, and once a week there will be a homework reading assignment of a few pages. There will
be a class Blog where students are placed in discussion groups of 4-5 and be asked to make two
original posts per week in addition to commenting on at least three posts per week. The first of the
habits we will work with will be questioning and making predictions as a way to pique interest in the
book and hopefully build motivation. This will be a chance for students to make connections to their
social studies unit on the Civil Rights Movement. Following this will be an introduction to the Digital
Book Talk, which will end up being the students final project for this unit. There will be no exam, per
se, to this unit. Students will be shown an example of a Digital Book Talk and also a model of how
what a Digital Book Talk Log. This will actually allow the students to work on the habit of determining
importance, as they will select a scene each time they are to complete a log and these scenes,
once accumulated, will comprise their Digital Book Talk. The final product will be completed using
IMovie, PhotoStory3, or Windows Movie Maker, and will have music that represents various moods
and there will also be narration. Part of the students grade will be based on their classmates
perceptions of the presentation based on a 4-point rubric.
Another lesson sketch included in this unit is one about narrative perspective. This will discuss
point-of-view as something more than just 1
st
, 2
nd
, or 3
rd
person. It is a composite of a persons life
experiences that influence their perspective of events. This will happen in the form of guiding
questions, a quick write, and a whole class discussion.
Both final projects are prime mediation tools (Vygotsky, 1986) as well as diverse, multimodal
forms of assessment (Jacobs, 2013). Both projects assess students on the different modes that
accompany each aspect of the assessments. In ELA, there are day-to-day tasks, such as the log,
which involve determining importance, drawing, as well as responding to text. For the final project
they are finding images, sequencing events in the story, applying music that represents different
moods. In addition, they will be asked to write a script for the narration and then narrate a voice-
over. Both of these assessments are empowering to students (Alvermann, 2001) because they give
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students control over the topics, as well as the mode in which it will be presented. In short, the
students are the dispensers of knowledge, which will be used to educate and entertain their
classmates.














References:
Alvermann, Donna E., Dillon, Deborah R., & O'Brien, David G. (1987). Using discussions to promote
reading comprehension. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Jacobs, Gloria E. (2013).Designing Assessments. Journal of Adolescent & Adult
Literacy, 56(8),623626 doi: 10.1002/JAAL.189
Miller, S. M. (2008). Teacher learning for new times: Repurposing new multimodal literacies and
digital-video composing for schools. In J. Flood, S.B. Heath, D. Lapp (Eds.) Handbook of research on
teaching literacy through the communicative and visual arts, ( pp. 441-460), Volume II. New York:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates and the International Reading Association.Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M.
(2006). New Literacies: Everyday Literacies & Classroom Learning (Second ed.). Maidenhead,
Berkshire,
England: Open University Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and language (A. Kozulin, Trans. ). Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
(Original work published 1934)