Culminating Product: Invasion or inspiration: stories of immigrants
To make real life of immigrants more exposed to the public, teacher and students will create a channel on YouTube, called Inferior or Inspiration, where students and teachers will upload inspiring stories of immigrants. In groups of 2 or 3, students will delineate experiences of one immigrant or one immigrant family in a form of video. The video can be a picture book (pictures, text and audio), a poetry recitation (the poetry is written by students), read-aloud a narrative piece about the immigrants’ life, and so on. In the assignment, students need to delineate immigrants’ life in the original country, reasons of immigration, process of immigration, life in the new society and the immigrants’ opinion on their immigration experience. Students should recognize the contribution from the immigrants and the unfair treatment or misunderstanding (if any) from the society that the immigrant(s) have been faced with or are still faced with. Students need to show their opinions and feelings about the case of the immigrants.
Task overview: We know unfair treatment and prejudice of immigrants are still very prevalent in the society. Those unfair treatment and prejudice originate from people’s misunderstanding about immigration and ignorance immigrant’s contribution. People do not think those immigrants are brave, wise and kind. I have a proposal: we can share all those amazing and inspiring stories we have heard to other people through Internet. We can create a channel on YouTube to share our learning experience. So, people in the U.S, or even people all over the world can hear about all those inspiring stories we heard and start to think differently about immigrants and appreciate all those brave people. You can use your camera to document immigrant’s life, record an interview and record their powerful voices, or you make an audio book with pictures, texts and your voices. If you like poem, you can write a long poem delineate the story of their life and express your opinion.
Understandings and goals that will be assessed through this task: 1.Students will recognize the hardship (living conditions, unfair treatment, prejudice from the society) the immigrant(s) in the video have been going through, in the original countries or in Untied States or both. 2.Students will think highly of the immigrants’ courage of changes and persistent purchase of their life goals, respect immigrants and even start to help eliminate prejudice to immigrants from society. 3.Recognize their own intelligence (language, musical, spatial) in using multimodal literature and plan their culminating product based on their self-assessment.
Criteria and Standard: 1.Clear narrative of the immigration experience in order 2.Including dialogues, actions, thoughts, and feelings to delineate life in the original country and in the new country, including living conditions, languages, work 3.Including reasonable critique on the unfair treatment and prejudice the immigrant as the closure of the video 4.Emphasis on the great spirits from the immigrant 5.Clear pictures and audio 6.Correct spelling and conventions
Products and performances that will provide evidence: A video in which either pictures with audio, a poem, a written narrative pieces or an interview with the immigrant is present
Mid-unit task: Story of My/Our/His/Her/ life:
Students create a booklet of 8 to 10 pages, which contains photos, pictures or drawing of important moments in an immigrant’s life. Underneath every photo, picture or drawing, students will write down some caption to explain time, place and action and why the moment is important.
Other evidences: 1. Social Studies notebooks: Students will take notes during the class. 2. Interview notes: Students will design interview questions and take notes while interview questions and notes. This assignment is designed for help students collect information and photos for the two performance tasks.
Student self-Assessment and Reflection 1. Self-assess on the Story of My/Our/His/Her/ life 2. Self-assess on the project Inferior or Inspiring: stories of immigrants 3. Choose one form of literature for the final project and state the reasons based on the features of the literature and their personal intelligence