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I love the idea of inviting listeners and readers to share an idea for an interdisciplinary unit idea. If you’re interested in sharing a topic, question, or resource you want to develop a unit around or coach teachers to develop a unit around, let me know in the comments below or reach out via email. This episode is a glimpse into my own brain’s process of taking a unit idea from a text I heard (and loved) to a full unit outline.
Why support the design of interdisciplinary units? From the research (and from practice), we know interdisciplinary units deepen understanding and nurtures students’ creative genius. Interdisciplinary unit questions and projects enable students to make connections and innovative applications relevant to their lives. This means learners are more engaged than in a siloed curriculum. Finally, it presents a wider range of options for students to advance justice in different areas and supports what Westheimer and Kahne call “justice-oriented citizenship.” Inspiration to Interdisciplinary Unit Outline: What is the process? Note: For context, I’m envisioning a Math, ELA, and Social Studies interdisciplinary unit, so I’ll brainstorm with those content areas in mind. Step 1: Inspiration. I was inspired by a poem by 2018 MacArthur Fellow, Natalie Diaz, called, “American Arithmetic.” Step 2: Brainstorm Initial Connections to Subjects. ELA: Literary choices and connections to lived experience and emotion. Social Studies: Histories and present day perspectives of indigenous people, the origins of the concept of race, and systems of governance and equitable representation. Math: Students’ experiences of math. Step 3: Essential Question. This is a year-long question that is relevant in all of a year’s units, even each lesson can connect to the EQ. Possible EQ: Is math more likely to mask injustice or make it visible? In a math class, we can visibility to statistics, geometry (e.g., gerrymandering), algebra (e.g., intersectionality). Step 4: Driving Question. This is a unit-specific question. In an interdisciplinary unit, this is used in all classes. Possible Question: What is the most powerful strategy to advance justice for indigenous peoples: math, language/poetry, or history? This enables students to create an argument for the subject area they most gravitate toward. Step 5: Project Idea. The project is the way students can answer/address the DQ. Possible idea: Performance poetry with math visuals in background. (I’m thinking something similar to how Hasan Minaj used visual graphs and images to do political commentary on his show, Patriot Act. Step 6: Lesson-Specific Activities or “Texts.” I aim for one “text” (resource) and one protocol (activity) per lesson. Possible text ideas: clips from Hasan Minaj’s show Patriot Act (use for project medium inspiration); Dr. John Littlewolf’s poem (he read this on episode 34 of the podcast); research on the longstanding injustice of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls; and Native-Land.Ca to have students research the land their community occupies. Final Tip Coach each teacher to develop a student-centered unit arc first. This will make it much easier to create new curriculum and build interdisciplinary units.
In lieu of a free resource, I’m inviting you to share a topic, resource, or question that you want to think through. Share your idea or question in the comments below. I might feature it on an episode (or invite you on, if that’s your jam!) And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 104 the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. TRANSCRIPT Educational justice coach, lindsey Lyons and here on the time for Teacher ship podcast, we learn how to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice design curricula grounded in student voice and build capacity for shared leadership. I'm a former teacher leader turned instructional coach. I'm striving to live a life full of learning, running, baking, traveling and parenting because we can be rockstar educators and be full human beings if you're a principal assistant superintendent, curriculum director instructional coach or teacher who enjoys nursing out about co creating curriculum students, I made this show for you. Here we go. Welcome to episode 102 of the time for teacher ship podcast. I am so excited for today's episode. I have been binge listening as I do when I find a new podcast that I absolutely love to brave new teaching which does some similar things in the sense of curriculum design and inspiring teachers to design new units. So some of the episodes have been around a specific unit idea or brainstorming a specific question for a unit to kind of framing unit and I was like, this sounds amazing. 00:01:07 I'm going to just do this with some episodes. Ultimately, I would love to be able to invite listeners to share a unit that you as an individual teacher if you're a teacher or if you're a coach or administrator or curriculum lead, just want some practice getting into the coaching space to be able to invite one of your teachers to share or share an idea that you might have that you want, might want to use as an example for teachers to kind of coach them through this process that you'll be able to share. It is my hope via email or something. Here's the question or topic or resource that I'm interested in developing a unit around or coaching a teacher to develop a unit around, do an episode on this or bring me on and coach me through it. So that is kind of my hope moving forward for our case study type of solo shows or maybe with a guest, we will get to that later. But for now know that we are going to dive into a unit that I have kind of plumbed my notes apps, the depths of my notes up for resources that over the last few years I've collected and said, hey, it would be cool to develop a unit around this, Wonder what that would be. 00:02:12 I hope someone does this and I'm just going to game out what that might be for a resource that I found. So get excited for this episode. Here we go, All right, as I said in our lengthy opening here, this episode is going to be around the design of a unit that is based off of a resource that I came across and thought, hey, this would be a super cool unit for someone to do and I'm just gonna put it out there in this episode, but anyone can kind of take this and run with it add to it. I am just kind of brainstorming, whatever is going on in my head in this moment kind of live, so to speak on the podcast as I think about and really highlight the process of what the unit creation like mindset questions, all this stuff in terms of process are when we create these new justice energy units. So here we go. This will be a bit of a different one. I want to frame the episode before I even get into the logistics and the content specifically. Like why are we talking about this particular thing? So I for context, I'm going to be brainstorming what could be a Math L. 00:03:19 A. Social studies interdisciplinary unit. You could use any of the two of those content areas. I think math in L. A. Was the first thing I thought. But I think any of these really clearly works and you can also bring in science too. I just hadn't brainstorm that far. But why is this important we know from the research and from just tangible experience with students. If anyone has tried interdisciplinary units before this really deepens students understanding and it nurtures creative genius and students, when we ask students to do innovative things, innovative projects, creation based projects that really ask them to synthesize a multitude of content areas. This is gold. This really nurtures that creativity that working with things in new ways. It is far beyond regurgitation or memorization of information and we reduce the silos that are all too common in education where we say this is the subject area that stays here, this is this subject area that stays here. We get students to weave it all together and really make meaning of it in a way that applies to their lives that advances justice, that helps them be better learners and what Westheimer and king called justice oriented citizens. 00:04:31 When we think about that concept of citizenship and citizenship, in a broad sense of people who reside here in participating communities here, not in illegal, they have documentation and citizenship status, but that idea of a just oriented citizen, one who advances justice and participates in communities to ensure justice for everyone. That's what ultimately I think education is all about and what we're striving for here and why we create Justice center units, interdisciplinary units with the goal of advancing justice really do this well. And while we're focusing on a driving question as the way we drive engagement around this idea of advancing justice and intersectional unit planning is critical because if that unit, I've talked about this before, if that unit doesn't have a driving question that is engaging, it compels students to answer, we are not going to have a very successful unit, it might engage students at the lesson level for occasional lessons, but that through line has to be present and has to be compelling. 00:05:32 That driving question really makes or breaks the unit. So here we go as we get into this again. The context is potentially a math L. A. Social studies, interdisciplinary unit. And the inspiration for this unit comes from a poem that is features featured on lit hub. It's called american arithmetic. It's a poem from Natalie Diaz And Natalie Diaz was actually named a 2018 MacArthur fellow as well. And this is the poem. I will read it for you and I'll also link to it in the notes. Native Americans make up less than 1% of the population of America. 0.8% of 100%. Oh, mine, efficient country. I do not remember the days before America. I do not remember the days when we were all here. Police kill native americans more than any other race. Race. It's a funny word. Race implies someone will win implies I have as good a chance of winning as we all know who wins a race that isn't a race. 00:06:43 Native Americans make up 1.9% of all police killings higher than any race and we exist as.8% of all Americans. Sometimes race means run. I'm not good at math. Can you blame me? I've had an american education. We are Americans and we are less than 1% of Americans. We do a better job of dying by police than we do existing when we are dying. Who should we call the police or our senator At the National Museum of the American Indian 68% of the collection is from the us. I'm doing my best not to become a museum of myself. I'm doing my best to breathe in and out. I am begging. Let me be lonely but not invisible In an American city of 100 people. I native American less than one less than whole. I am less than myself. Only a fraction of a body let's say I am only a hand. And when I slip it beneath the shirt of my lover, I disappear completely. So that's the poem that I came across. 00:07:51 I loved. There's so much in here. I think this could be the core text of a unit. There is depth of emotion. It talks very specifically about the lived experience. It centers the lived experience of this indigenous author. There's so much to dive into here. You could also unpack the histories and lived experiences and math in linguistic choices. Right? So again, we're looking at all of the content areas, math, ela or literacy, social studies or history. That you could pull together to dive into. What is this author trying to tell us What is this author's lived experience? What is the emotionality of that lived experience. And then looking at pieces like I'm just going to name some of the things that that popped out to me. We have this idea of math running through, right. The title even american arithmetic runs through. So there's this like less than 1% as this math number or stat that the author returns to again and again. 00:09:04 But there's also this concept of I'm not good at math. Can you blame me? I've had an american education, right? Those two lines are powerful and that we can have students dig into that concept of how does math and make invisible, not just from a stats perspective in how we report math and how we use math but also making students and learners feel invisible in that math is not for them because we often historically have taught it in this one way. There's so much in here. The historical or social studies ties to um you know like policing. And then also do I call my senator right? Like so there's also this idea of who is representing me and what does that representation look like and what are historically and currently what has been done by the american government on behalf of indigenous folks right? There's so much in here. The concept of race itself. You pull in attacks like stamp from the beginning. Um there's that that middle school version right? 00:10:06 That you can pull in um for for kind of a youth friendly piece from doctor in Mexico City. So there's so much that on an inspiration level right? Like step one be inspired by something that is out there. A resource that you come across. That inspiration then can lead you down this process of developing the unit around the inspiration. So let your brain kind of mind map around that core text or that key resource. It sometimes might be a key question that you heard posed by someone on the news or in conversation at a dinner party or whatever. But whatever it is, you want to kind of go all the different directions with your brain first and then I'll tell you the process, I'll walk through it right now that that might look like and you might want to coach teachers around to get to the end goal of a clear unit where we have a lesson by lesson plan. We have a driving question that frames the entire unit and is the through line throughout and we have a project where students are addressing that question in a creative way. So we have the poem, The next question that we want to ask is what kind of essential question. 00:11:13 This is a question to me. Essential questions. And I've talked about this many times before. So definitely go back and listen to some other episodes on essential Question, crafting an essential question, the curriculum planning series. This is a really good place to go. There's an episode on that. But essential questions to me are the ones that frame an entire year. So, these are things that at any point typically in a lesson throughout the year, you can tie back to one of these essential questions because they're always relevant when we think of a unit framing question, we think of a driving question and that's contextualized a bit further. So an essential question that this ties to, let's say I'm a math teacher, but my math essential question for the year, one of maybe one or two could be, is math more likely to mask injustice or make it more visible. Right? So this idea of math making people and experiences and injustices visible or masking that making invisible is something that I might want to have students grapple with every time they interact with the math, they have this question in their head, right? 00:12:17 Every single day, every single math problem or situation where using math to explain Is the way that I'm using math or the way that this person is framing math in a documentary, right? We might watch a movie like 13th, for example, is that math that they're using the graphs, the way that the math is displayed or discussed. Is that masking injustice or is it unmasking injustices it? Making injustice more visible in a way that historically has been made invisible. Right? And so how is Matthews historically and how is it used in this piece? That's just an example of a lesson that in the course of a year it could happen. So I'm thinking about this essential question of this idea of math making justice visible or invisible being used as a tool to do either one of those things and I can use this for a lot of math classes. Right? At the high school level. There's often talk about, oh well if I taught statistics would be so easy to teach about justice. Okay well sure. Statistics. But also you can do things like this in other specific subject areas. 00:13:20 For example geometry you could talk about math and gerrymandering and how do people get represented or not represented? How is justice advanced or halted by the way that we use math to give people access to voting, right? We can use it in something like algebra. So looking at the way that we use math in looking at the wage gap. And do we make the intersectional nature of the gender, wage gap visible or invisible? Right? So do we look at the intersection of gender and race, gender and ability, gender and sexual orientation, gender and immigration status. Right? So often we talk about these concepts. How can we use algebra to make them more visible rather than less visible or more monolithic in the way that we're using that math. I think that's essential question works really well for a variety of math spaces now, for our unit. Specifically we want a driving question that makes a little bit more context specific. 00:14:26 If we're using this text again, american arithmetic as the framing for unit either in a math class or an intersectional unit right? Where we're pulling in things like L. A. And social studies. So totally just brainstorming here. But it could be something like what's the most powerful strategy to advance justice for indigenous peoples? Maybe that's your driving question. So then you could have kind of like a colon and then you could say is it math? Is it history or is it language or poetry even more specifically for the L. A. Lens. So you can almost frame like these three subject areas, Math L. A. And history as kind of which tool is more or which you know, way of thinking or approaching a problem is more valuable, right? In terms of advancing justice? Is it math? Is it language of poetry? Is it history? What is the most powerful information or kind of tool that is given to us through this content area to be able to advance justice. 00:15:35 And so I love that because it kind of compels students answer in the sense that typically there are people who are more interested in math or more inclined to write or perform, right? So that language or poetry aspect. And then there's other folks who are really interested in factual history research uncovering narratives kind of stuff. So you have all of these students who have these natural inclinations for these different subject areas and you kind of not pit them against one another in this like competitive sense. But this idea of like OK justify your preference for this discipline or subject area in how it and your positioning this in the context of how it advances justice, how it enables us to advance justice, not just which subject is the best and why, Right? But we're truly contextualizing it in the sense of like, what are we here to do? We're here to learn yes. But in the concept of justice oriented citizens from Westheimer and Kane, right, that's the purpose. 00:16:39 We are advancing justice and we're learning how to do that here and learning how to take all the information and skills. We're learning in these different subject areas and apply them in a way that does that. So, that could be a cool question that compels students to respond based on their personal kind of preferences or just the way the brain works. Right? I am really gravitating towards this subject area. So that is the subject area, I wanna explore more, and ultimately they can choose an answer, do a whole project on that answer, do an amazing job and then see the other students final projects and answers and then be swayed by those students actually change their mind after they've completed the summit of assessment, which is totally fine and cool. Right, So, I love this. I think there's definitely room for improvement and you may come up with ones that are even better. So this is just what's in my brain at the moment. Please feel free to leave comments on the blog post, to email me and tell me all the better driving questions you've come up with. I would love to hear them and I think the next step here. So just for a recap because we've talked a lot, we have the inspiration which was the poem american arithmetic. 00:17:40 We have the brainstorm of an essential question, something that lasts the whole year. Then we have the driving question that is specific to that unit of study. And then we now come to the point where we ask how well students do this. How will they show us or demonstrate their learning, their content knowledge, their skills that they're developing. I always try to have the project answer the driving question. So the question is more of a format one. What will this look like? How will they present or or share their answer or response to the driving question. So you could have them do. I think this would be super cool. I think it's always great to open it up to students. But if you want to kind of give a goal and then they can kind of deviate your personalize from there. You can or if you want it completely open ended, you can. But one thing I think would be super cool again based on my bias of how I take in information. What I think is interesting would be to do some sort of like performance, poetry piece with like math visuals in the background or like pictures or photographic evidence of like the various history stuff kind of like uh manages Patriot Act that was on netflix. 00:18:57 So that could be kind of like something that you watch as a specific lesson level idea of resource that you have students explore. Like how does he use all of these really powerful like math graphs and statistics and visuals of math to make his point in a comedic way? Right. So he does comedy. But he uses and leverages all of these really cool interesting visuals to be able to make his point. How might we do that in the sense of, you know, telling more stories using poetry, all this stuff. So I'm envisioning that students would actually come together as a group and we have like a math oriented person, a history oriented person and an L. A oriented person. And they're kind of like working as a group of three for example, each within their own kind of affinities and working together to share information and resources and then kind of specializing in the writing of the poetry with of course feedback and edits done as a group, the mathematical or graphical representations of the data they have uncovered and the deep dive into the primary sources, the, you know, evidence historically to bring that to life. 00:20:12 So we each kind of gravitate to our own places in the summit of project throughout the lesson or throughout the unit. Excuse me, we would want students doing all of these skills and practicing all these skills and of course they're working together. But I think it's also okay if students answer to this driving question right? The most powerful strategy is X to do the X right to focus on the X in terms of their final project. So math is the best strategy for advancing justice for indigenous people. And here is all of these math visuals that are going to do that. My group members are going to do the other pieces and together we're gonna have an amazing project. So no matter what the answer actually is to the viewer or listener or audience member as they watch our project or hear our project, we have covered all of our bases to be great. We've we've actually bridged all of these approaches. So I think that would be very cool. Is that ultimately as units are like, oh, the combo, right? The combination of math and language and poetry and history, that's what's most powerful is leveraging all of these pieces. 00:21:15 So it's really cool. I think at the end of this unit to have space for students to reflect and kind of come to that consensus or maybe not, maybe they choose an answer. They don't have to have one right answer. But I think it'd be cool to make space for that reflection after all of the students have presented or shared their project in some way and the whole class has kind of been able to see it and check it out and then make sense of it and say yes, my answer has changed or no, it has not. So other things that I might consider in terms of just a quick brainstorm of activities or resources to use in a unit like this. Dr john Little Wolf is an indigenous scholar and poet who is on our podcast. You can actually pull the episode and use his poetry that he reads aloud on there. I would do something like that to give more experiences lived experiences of indigenous folks and get a poetry sample at the same time. So you're kind of looking at the lived experience piece and you're also looking at poetry as a way to talk about lived experience to kind of collect some of those. 00:22:19 I would also, in terms of the history and current events, ties look at missing and murdered indigenous women and girls and what is going on there in terms of the media, the under representation in the media of just this huge issue that is not being publicized nearly enough. And what's going on there and how is math being used to make this either more visible or less visible in different circles and spaces also taking a look at if we're if we're looking at the idea of language more broadly and not just focusing on poetry, you could think about other spaces where language is used or not used. So for example using native dash land dot c a as a website to explore the indigenous lands that we currently occupy, What would it look like to use or how beneficial would it be in advancing justice? It may, it may not right. That's something you can discuss as a group to, to talk about amongst themselves with other classes, with adults and people in the community, with people outside of the community. 00:23:24 What would it look like to use? The language of the land that we occupy, right? The native nations, right? The indigenous nations that we currently occupy as opposed to or in conjunction with what that community, city state, whatever is currently called, right? What are the native lands that were occupying in that space with that type of language shift, advanced justice right into what's a grade. So there's so many things here um, as a kind of tip. Additionally, when we're designing units at any point, I think it's also beneficial to have a student centered unit arc in place first before you actually get into the content of the unit. Before you even get to that piece of like project inspiration and going to the essential question and then the driving question and then the project and then the lesson level activities just to summarize what those steps were. I think it's really great to have a student center unit in place and to do the curriculum building from there. You already have all of these student centered activities where they're going to be grappling with all of these resources as you're free resource for the episode. 00:24:33 I'm actually going to invite you. It's going to be an invitation as opposed to a google doc. It's going to be an invitation to submit a topic resource or question that you want help with regarding creating a justice centered unit or coaching someone around the creation of a justice centered unit. And I will either feature it on an episode where I'll do something like this and kind of brainstorm and pose some questions around this and talk about the process. Or I will invite you on the podcast and we'll have a conversation and we'll coach through it together. So with that, send me an email. If you're interested in that invitation and responding to the invitation, you have a topic resource or question you want to design around and I will talk to you next week if you're leaving this episode, wanting more, you're going to love my live coaching intensive curriculum bootcamp. I help one department or grade team create feminist anti racist curricula that challenges affirms and inspires all students. We leave current events into course content and amplify student voices which skyrockets engagement and academic achievement. 00:25:37 It energizes educators feeling burns out and it's just two days plus you can reuse the same process any time you create a new unit which saves time and money if you can't wait to bring this to your staff, I'm inviting you to sign up for a 20 minute call with me, grab a spot on my calendar at www dot lindsey beth Lyons dot com slash contact. Until next time leaders continue to think big act brave and be your best self. This podcast is a proud member of the teach, Better podcast network, better today, better tomorrow and the podcast to get you there, explore more podcasts at teach better dot com slash podcasts and we'll see you at the next episode. Quotes:
Want to continue learning more about curriculum development and implementation? Watch this video on how to develop district curriculum that challenges, affirms, and inspires:
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AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
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