Who decides who among us is civilized? What rules should govern immigration into the United States? Whom should we let in? Keep out? What should we do about political refugees or children without papers? What if they would be a drain on our economy?

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Students read William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest and write a short argument about who in the play is truly civilized.
Students participate in a mock trial in which they argue for or against granting asylum to a teenage refugee, and then they write arguments in favor of granting asylum to one refugee and against granting it to another.
Students read an Independent Reading text and write an informational essay about a global issue and how that relates to their book.

GUIDING QUESTIONS

These questions are a guide to stimulate thinking, discussion, and writing on the themes and ideas in the unit. For complete and thoughtful answers and for meaningful discussions, students must use evidence based on careful reading of the texts.

What role do national identity, custom, religion, and other locally held beliefs play in a world increasingly characterized by globalization?
How does Shakespeare’s view of human rights compare with that in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
Who is civilized? Who decides what civilization is or how it’s defined?
How do we behave toward and acknowledge those whose culture is different from our own?

In this lesson, students will share their drafts of their fear narratives and give feedback in small groups. They’ll have class time to revise and complete a final draft. They’ll revisit the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to see what the document says about immigrants and refugees.

Discerning the ethnic and racial dimensions of politics is considered by some indispensable to understanding contemporary world politics. This course seeks to answer fundamental questions about racial and ethnic politics. To begin, what are the bases of ethnic and racial identities? What accounts for political mobilization based upon such identities? What are the political claims and goals of such mobilization and is conflict between groups and/or with government forces inevitable? How do ethnic and racial identities intersect with other identities, such as gender and class, which are themselves the sources of social, political, and economic cleavages? Finally, how are domestic ethnic/racial politics connected to international human rights? To answer these questions, the course begins with an introduction to dominant theoretical approaches to racial and ethnic identity. The course then considers these approaches in light of current events in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the United States.

There are three separate lessons on the three branches of government. We recommend starting with the Executive Branch, followed by the Legislative Branch and then the Judicial Branch, as some of the information builds on a previous lesson. Also, students are probably most familiar with the executive branch and they may already know the answers to many of the questions covered in this lesson.

Once the pride of the German Navy, this 700 foot long heavy cruiser was used by the U.S. as a test target for not one but two atom bombs at Bikini atoll. Today, at the bottom of the ocean, the radiation levels of the Prinz Eugen are low enough for safe exploration. In this video, Jonathan joins historian Mark Miller on a trip to explore this mysterious shipwreck. What they find about the condition of this wreck is surprising. Please see the accompanying lesson plan for educational objectives, discussion points and classroom activities.

This course uses theories of gender to explore sociopolitical, ethical and theological perspectives on immigration policy, with a focus on the U.S. The course begins with an overview of global developments in the feminization of migration and ethical and policy dilemmas that are specific to the current era.

In a quiet forest in central Florida, a mysterious pond filled with warm clear water hides a secret at the bottom. In this video, Jonathan explores the pond to find a spring which leads into a cave. As Jonathan travels underground, he meets unexpected marine life in the dark depths and learns how water travels through an aquifer from the underground world to the surface. Please see the accompanying study guide for educational objectives and discussion points.

How do we, as youth, respond to gun violence in our communities? The Gun Violence webcast explores gun violence in Pakistan, Somalia, and the United States.

This course examines systematically, and comparatively, great and middle power military interventions, and candidate military interventions, into civil wars from the 1990s to the present. These civil wars did not easily fit into the traditional category of vital interest. These interventions may therefore tell us something about broad trends in international politics including the nature of unipolarity, the erosion of sovereignty, the security implications of globalization, and the nature of modern western military power.

Objectives:
* Illustrate the problem of food waste in the United States.
* Inspire students to make conscious efforts to reduce their food waste.
* Use the mini food waste audit activity to demonstrate to students how they are contributing to the problem

This compilation of secondary sources gives an account for how the Transatlantic slave trade became a key economic feature of the Western coast of Africa, as well as an important economic feature of the "New World" colonies. This is a guided reading with questions throughout for the purpose of assessing students' understanding. Student's are prompted to mark the text for key details as they follow along. An excellent source to print or to use digitally. 

This class introduces students to innovative as well as classic approaches to studying U.S. government. The writing assignments will help you explore, through a variety of lenses, statis and change in the American political system over the last three decades. In the end each student will have a solid grounding in our national political institutions and processes, sharper reading and writing skills, and insight into approaching politics critically and analytically.

This course aims to provide students with a general overview of basic themes and issues in Middle Eastern history from the rise of Islam to the present, with an emphasis on the encounters and exchanges between the “Middle East” (Southwest Asia and North Africa) and the “West” (Europe and the United States).

This course explores Japan’s role in world orders, past, present, and future. It focuses on Japanese conceptions of security; rearmament debates; the relationship of domestic politics to foreign policy; the impact of Japanese technological and economic transformation at home and abroad; alternative trade and security regimes; Japan’s response to 9/11; and relations with Asian neighbors, Russia, and the alliance with the United States.

There are three separate lessons on the branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial. We recommend teaching these lessons in that particular order, as some content builds on the previous lesson. Covers civics test items 13, 37, 38, 39, and 40.

In the north Atlantic, the American Lobster is the undisputed king of crustaceans. It‰ŰŞs also a tremendously important commercial catch. While all the other fisheries are collapsing, why are lobsters resisting the trend? In this video, Jonathan goes out with a Maine lobsterman to learn why, and he dives down below to find the biggest lobsters he has ever seen. This segment won a New England Emmy Award! Please see the accompanying study guide for educational objectives and discussion points.

This seminar explores “land” as a genre, theme, and medium of art and architecture of the last five decades. Focusing largely on work within the boundaries of the United States, the course seeks to understand how the use of land in art and architecture is bound into complicated entanglements of property and power, the inheritances of non-U.S. traditions, and the violence of colonial ambitions. The term “landscape” is variously deployed in the service of a range of political and philosophical positions.

This course studies the interaction between law, courts, and social movements in shaping domestic and global public policy. Examines how groups mobilize to use law to affect change and why they succeed and fail. The class uses case studies to explore the interplay between law, social movements, and public policy in current areas such as gender, race, labor, trade, environment, and human rights. Finally, it introduces the theories of public policy, social movements, law and society, and transnational studies.

There are three separate lessons on the three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial. We recommend teaching the government lessons in that order, as some content builds on a previous lesson. Covers civics test items 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 31, 47, and 55.

Everyday we are bombarded with the word “global” and encouraged to see globalization as the quintessential transformation of our age. But what exactly does “globalization” mean? How is it affecting the lives of people around the world, not only in economic, but social and cultural terms? How do contemporary changes compare with those from other historical periods? Are such changes positive, negative or simply inevitable? And, finally, how does the concept of the “global” itself shape our perceptions in ways that both help us understand the contemporary world and potentially distort it? This course begins by offering a brief overview of historical “world systems,” including those centered in Asia as well as Europe. It explores the nature of contemporary transformations, including those in economics, media & information technologies, population flows, and consumer habits, not through abstractions but by focusing on the daily lives of people in various parts of the world. This course considers such topics as the day-to-day impact of computers in Silicon Valley and among Tibetan refugees; the dilemmas of factory workers in the US and rural Java; the attractions of Bombay cinema in Nigeria, the making of rap music in Japan, and the cultural complexities of immigrant life in France. This course seeks not only to understand the various forms globalization takes, but to understand its very different impacts world-wide.