Meg Klingelhofer EDUC 555: Draft of Context Tuesday, 28 January 2014 Social studies is not a tested subject in the

state of Pennsylvania. That doesnt mean, however, that it doesnt matter or that it is a class that requires less effort than others for Penn Alexander Schools middle school students. The seventh graders have spent much of the year studying what I like to call all the bad things that have ever happened in history. This means that they studied such tragedies as the Rwandan genocide and the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, while also learning about the Red Scares and the Cold War. They are studying World War II through the lenses of popular resistance movements, by reading John Steinbecks The Moon Is Down, as well as other supplementary reading, mostly in the form of graphic novels, such as Carla Jablonskis Resistance and Defiance. They will also soon be moving on to the Holocaust through the reading of Al Spiegelmans first volume of Maus and creation of their own graphic novels. Because of their exhaustive study of this time period, I want to focus my curriculum unit on the conditions that allowed for the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, as well as that brought about the conflict that has continued there since World War I. I want to work with this subject because the students have demonstrated a lot of curiosity about the role of leaders, whether a strong leader is present, a weak leader is present, or no leader is present through a long discussion of Hitlers rise to power and the origin of ideas that led to the Holocaust. Through this discussion, the students learned that lack of a strong leader makes populations feel extremely uneasy, which is how Hitler gained so much support rapidly when he first arrived on the scene in Germany. Of

course, after he gained power people began to be wary of his intentions with his whole philosophy of the master race, which led to the Holocaust and a need for a place for the displaced Jewish population of Europe following World War II. From this unit, I want students to understand how the leadership of Palestine in the time between World War I and 1948, namely Great Britain, failed to handle the situation correctly and then abandoned the two groups living in the same territory, thereby bringing about the conflict that still exists today. This idea seems grand and vague, so I am working to give it more direction and specific subjects, tasks, and assessments, but this is the general idea of my curriculum unit. For my inquiry question, I have two that I keep going back and forth with in my head. The first is more applicable to the teaching of the curriculum unit, whereas the second is more general about teachers relationship to their students. My first question has to do with using multiple intelligences in teaching in order to tap into each individual students strengths and get students really engaged in what they are learning. My second question is more about determining whether it is possible to change a students selfperception after other teachers have given up on him. This question has arisen through observation of treatment of a particular eighth grade student since I started student teaching in the middle school, so it seems more compelling for me own teaching experience but also much more difficult to research, especially because the student will not even be in one of the classes that I will teach during the two-week takeover.