The goal of any learning experience is to have learners who are engaged and productive and therefore for the entire learning experience to be engaging and effective. This means the experience must create a environment where learners care about what they are learning, and can then transfer that learning on their own to solve real problems.

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Learner engagement and interest in and capacity for learning of any subject are closely dependent on two things -  why they are learning something and what prior knowledge, experiences and misconceptions they bring with them. Both of these principles have been given the highest importance throughout the planning of this unit.

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Cunningham and Cunningham say that the principle of Cognitive Clarity is paramount when it comes to any learning. “Cognitive clarity is knowing what you are trying to do and understanding where you are trying to go and why you are going there… you are able to cooperate with the instruction you receive because you know what your teacher is trying to help you learn” (Cunningham, 88). This idea as they say is important for any learning and I agree, but I believe it is critical when learning Social Studies. The fact that most social studies is historical and has happened a long time ago is often a great deterrent for students to engage. They  fail to see why it matters today, and/or how it applies to their lives.  To counter the “ I don’t care” attitude often times displayed, this unit prioritizes informing them of the why, when they are learning something and thereby increasing engagement.

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Learners also do not come to a learning experience empty. “Learners are not blank slates. They come to the learning situation with knowledge, experience, and quite possibly some misconceptions” (Wiggins, 142). This prior information creates filters as they learn, it is also equally influential in how they produce or transfer their information learned into real life.

Using their interests, their background and tying that into their learning is a key component to making their learning go beyond recall, to creating an ability to transfer it to other contexts. “In the all effective domain, expertise involves developing self interest, purpose, motivation and most important strong self regulation as a learner.” (UDL, Meyer, 90)  

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“Content should be chosen so as to exemplify the representative ideas of the disciplines. Representative ideas are concepts that afford an understanding of the main features of the discipline. They are not minor or subordinate ideas; they disclose the essence of the discipline. They are elements of the subject that stand for the whole of important aspects of it . . . They are epitomes of the subject.” —Philip Phenix, Realms of Meaning

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The epitome of social studies, history or civics in my opinion is the idea of perspectives. The NCSS standards support this thought as well since it says that “The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.” Students can only make informed and reasoned decisions when they have the ability to see perspectives and other points of view.

In the six facets of understanding as explained by UBD, the principle of point of view or perspectives is critically important. Although UBD principles stress that the six facets are not hierarchical, I strongly believe that having knowledge and an ability to interpret and apply the same, is what leads to any person then consequently having a point of view or perspective. Once students have a perspective is only when they are able to further empathize and create knowledge of self.

As a teacher of this unit, my role is to offer students a lens of perspective in addition to knowledge acquisition so they may move towards insight, judgement and the ability to act and think with wisdom.

“Based on analysis of a Census Bureau data for 2018, there are 67.3 million residents in the United States who speak a language other than English at home.” (Zeigler & Camarota, 2019) My placement is in a 4th grade classroom and of the 30 students over 50% speak a language other than English (LOTE) in their homes; 7 students of this 50% are also English language learners; and I am trilingual myself  however the languages I speak are different from all but one of the students in class. I think it’s safe to say our classrooms are a reflection of these statistics and most schools have a diverse linguistic and cultural population.

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Adding a language, multicultural and global lens “can ensure that all students have equitable access to the transfer and meaning goals in units of study, ensuring equity for culturally and linguistically diverse students in particular... This linguistic analysis also aims to reduce the expert blind spot, a phenomenon in which educators… have difficulty empathizing with students who are novices in the field and may have radically different experiences than their own” (Wiggins, 2005). In addition to equitable learning and not allowing teacher blind spots to influence student learning, language and cultural focus also shows students how their culture and who they are is of value.

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