Facing the Future, the Past, and Ourselves

Lately, I ‘ve realized that my biggest passion in education is curriculum development.  It was always my favorite part of being a teacher- designing the lessons that I would teach to my students.  After my first few years of teaching, I landed in a number of roles that truly gave me freedom in designing curriculum that was innovative, impactful and culturally relevant from designing an ELL curriculum and program for high school students to working on a design team to support teachers to build more engaging online courses, to creating a computer science course for girls.  I recently applied for a position as a curriculum developer for Facing History & Ourselves.  They are a phenomenal organization whose website is a treasure trove for educators interested in helping students become active, reflective citizens in the world. 
 
 
Facing History & Ourselves has created the following framework,  Pedagogical Triangle for Historical and Civic Understanding. 

Source:  ​https://www.facinghistory.org/

​According to their website: 
 
“We engage the mind, heart, and conscience of adolescents who are in the midst of determining who they are and how they interact with the world.  We challenge our students to reflect on and analyze moral questions and dilemmas that arise during the study of history and literature. Our curriculum guides students as they explore human behavior, asking them to consider connections between their own actions and the actions of others. By examining the complexities of being human, we nurture caring and curious adolescents who grow into brave and engaged adults.”
 
The Facing History & Ourselves scope and sequence known as the Facing History Journey starts by having students examine human behaviors, beliefs and attitudes in their own lives.  Students are then presented with a historical case study or piece of literature to further explore the complexity of humanity that was dealt with in the beginning.  Finally, students do creative or reflective work to explore the implications in our current society studied in the works they explored.  I reviewed in depth two powerful curricular units that I found on the website:  Power, Agency, and Voice and Facing Ferguson:  News Literacy in a Digital Age. Power, Agency, and Voice is an ELA lesson that focuses on helping students explore what it means to have power and agency and then using your voice to exert that agency.  It uses two powerful pieces of literature, a short story by Bethany Morrow called “As You Were” and a spoken word poem by Clint Smith titled, "The Danger of Silence" to contrast ways people use and don’t use their voice to exert power and agency.  Facing Ferguson:  News Literacy in a Digital Age explores the historical case study of the police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager and the impact it had on the community in Ferguson, Missouri and the nation.  Students begin by deciding on a contract for holding sensitive conversations then move into a discussion about identity and bias followed by an exploration of news reports, journalism and social media.  For this unit Facing History recorded interviews with a number of journalists and media experts to help students understand their process and perspective. 
 
There are several things that are truly impressive about the units.  They are broken down into smaller lessons that can be remixed to create additional lessons for other topics.   They are student-centered and provide wonderful discussion questions, handouts and teaching strategies to help frame student discussions and keep students engaged.  You can create an account on the website and then save lessons, texts, units and teaching strategies into collections for yourself.  You can also download the units into Google Classroom and many of the texts are available in Spanish as well as English. Finally, there is a collection of professional development to support teachers in their journey to use this curriculum.  I viewed a wonderful professional development webinar with Clint Smith, the poet, teacher and scholar of one of the lessons I reviewed.  It was called, "Working for Justice, Equity and Civic Agency in Our Schools."  He discussed the work needed to portray a complete history to young people and what that work looks like.
 
I am excited to refer back to Facing History & Ourselves as a gold standard for how to develop rigorous, timely, engaging curriculum that helps students be conscientious and civic-minded as I look for opportunities to go back to work in this field. My hope is to develop relevant curriculum units that explore the intersection of computer science, digital civics and wellness, social justice and stories.