In Part One of this lesson, students are introduced to apartheid in South Africa. They watch clips from Steven Van Zandt and Arthur Baker's Sun City documentary to learn about apartheid, and attempt to experience what life might have been like during apartheid through a classroom activity. Then, students consider ways in which apartheid could be fought, and whether elements of apartheid in South Africa also existed in the history of the United States.

In Part 2 of this lesson, students view clips from the Sun City documentary and explore how musicians united to challenge apartheid. In a group setting, students will consider the various strategies activists, corporations, and other governments used to isolate the South African government and hasten the end of apartheid. Finally, students consider how apartheid relates to segregation in the United States.

This course explores contemporary American theatrical expression as it may be organized around issues of gender and cultural identity. This exploration will include the analysis of performances, scripts, and video documentation, as well as the invention of original documents of theatrical expression. Class lectures and discussions will analyze samples of Native American, Chicano, African American, and Asian American theater, taking into consideration the historical and political context for the creation of these works. Performance exercises will help students identify theatrical forms and techniques used by these theaters, and how these techniques contribute to the overall goals of specific theatrical expressions.

The corrupting influence of slavery on marriage and the family is a predominant theme in Solomon Northup's narrative Twelve Years a Slave. In this lesson, students are asked to identify and analyze narrative passages that provide evidence for how slavery undermined and perverted these social institutions. Northup collaborated with a white ghostwriter, David Wilson. Students will read the preface and identify and analyze statements Wilson makes to prove the narrative is true.

This unit seeks to develop an awareness of and the application of a Critical Race Theory lens to the reading and analysis of literature and films. Using an Inquiry based learning approach, it asks students to notice and wonder about the visual images that barrage their daily lives and the coded language they are complicit in use or acquiescence. The unit requires that students guide the inquiry by generating questions about the world as depicted in literature, seek voices not heard or ways that interests may converge. It asks students to try to make sense of their discoveries by explaining and debating positions on issues or concepts based on reflection, research and analysis. This unit seeks to empower middle and high school students to not only question the status quo but challenges them to create/recreate counternarratives reflective of utopians for the world they failed to discover in literature.

This unit will examine the genre of science fiction—specifically Afrofuturism. The genre of Afrofuturism will allow students freedom to creatively write about worlds of utopia not limited by one’s current reality and seek to modify the future by going back to alter one’s future using tools of science, mysticism, and social justice.

This unit centers around two pedagogical ideas within the context of the secondary English classroom. The first is that by sharpening skills of critical analysis, students can use those skills across multiple disciplines and in their lives outside of school. The second is that students need more opportunities to respond to texts through the creation of their own texts. Drawing from work that I do in my own classroom, the structure of this YNHTI Seminar led by Dr. Ferguson, and changes happening in college-level composition courses like the First Year Writing course at UCONN, this unit asks students to apply skills of critical analysis to three visual texts by Clotilde Jimenez and then respond to those texts by composing a creative text of their own. Intended to be a unit done with students in the beginning stages of the school year, this unit will provide a foundation for visual literacy skills that can be put to use in other arenas of study both in the English classroom and in other classes throughout the rest of the academic year. For this unit, the three visual texts are all by the artist Clotilde Jimenez, an artist who works primarily in mixed media collage.