April 12-14 (11:26 total hours logged)

Though this week has started a bit slower than last week, I am still enjoying the project and looking forward to many things. The structural content changes that I decided to implement last week (read about them here) have worked very well. Voting rights has been such a rewarding topic to study because it is so central to the American identity. I feel like most, if not all, of the information that I have taken in over the past 41 hours is relevant to my life as an American (which is not something that I can say about many topics I have studied throughout high school). I do not feel like this topic will be too broad—the areas that I am currently exploring have plenty of content to work with.

Furthermore, though I stated that I wish to shift my focus to developing asynchronous content, I may have a connection with a teacher in Minnesota referred to me by Ann. She is teaching a course on American politics that I think would fit well with my project. This is a really exciting opportunity for me, as I may get to see firsthand how my curriculum works in the classroom. This thought has lingered in my head as I have been designing activities—I know that the lessons I’m planning would interest me, but what about the students it’s intended for? I think it would be a shame if I created this voting rights course without being able to get feedback from students or a teacher on how it actually works. I will hopefully have more news about this connection by the time I next update this journal.

Though I have made plenty of progress in these first couple of days, I have also encountered some struggles when it comes to tying together the different areas of voting rights. I do not have a solid idea of how this course will flow from one subtopic to the next. I think I want to start with the history of the franchise since that gives a lot of the historical and constitutional context for the other subtopics (eg. how the 15th Amendment expanded the vote to black men but was also defied in Southern states through poll taxes, literacy tests, and other forms of voter suppression). I compiled all my notes on this subtopic into this document.

But where to go from there? I am currently designing a two- or three-class unit on the Electoral College (resources all linked in this folder). Additionally, I am working on the gerrymandering activity that I described in last week’s journal entry, and I still have the “Getting to Know Your Reps” activity to fit in somewhere. All of these ideas are definitely ambitious, and I think I need to give myself some more direction when it comes to tying them all together. I think I will create some sort of roadmap/timeline planning out the unit-to-unit, lesson-to-lesson progression of the course. Which activity milestones (eg. Electoral College debate, gerrymandering activity) do I want to hit, and which order should they come in? I will keep this in mind as I continue into the week.

 

April 15-16 (22:58 total hours logged)

For the past two days, I have established a connection with one of Ann’s former teaching colleagues who works at a high school in Minnesota. The teacher, Ms. O, moderates the Young Democrats club, a group of about twenty 9th-12th graders that discusses current political events from a Democrat perspective. The group also helped to turn out the vote among their high school seniors and to educate their peers on their elected representatives. 

I met with Ms. O and the student leader of the Young Democrats (also a 12th grader) on Wednesday. They told me that I would be able to Zoom in to teach a 45-minute session every other week (starting next week). This is huge news for my project! I am particularly excited about working with students my age, even though I initially planned to teach to middle schoolers. I feel like I can design my curriculum at a more advanced level and worry a bit less about whether my audience has a sufficient amount of background information.

Some of the topics that students are interested in learning about include gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the Supreme Court’s impact on voting rights. This is great for me because I was planning on covering all of these areas anyways. However, this means I will have to put my “history of voting” unit on hold for a bit; creating content for the Highland students is my #1 priority right now. As such, I have started creating a presentation on gerrymandering. I plan to give an overview of Congressional apportionment and then dive deeper into examples of elections affected by gerrymandering. It’s still under construction, and I want to incorporate more interactive elements (perhaps the original activity I devised that would ask students to gerrymander hypothetical states). Here is the slide deck: