Students pair Dorothea Lange's photographs with passages from John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath. Students create an oral group presentation and discuss the relationship between the images and text.
This unit, in this course, is done at the end of the term as class teams prepare their presentations during finals week (the final project is a summative assignment). Students will view YouTube videos in and/or out of class to prepare for this in-person lesson. Student presenters will be required to practice group presentation skills. Students in the audience will be required to internalize the presenter’s information from a marginalized identity perspective to ask the presenters questions.
Note: I have found including humor-related activities, such as this one, at the end of the term to be stress-relieving for students and less conducive to students’ public speaking apprehension.
Goals:
*Practice generic presentation skills (e.g., the structure of the presentation, audience analysis, using credible sources)
*Practice presentation skills specific to group presentation (e.g., speaker transitions, group Q&A)
*The presenter’s voice/perspective is usually privileged, just naturally how we think - this assignment requires the presenter to check their assumptions.
*Check the audience privilege: Think in terms of how information is expressed and how audience members from diverse backgrounds will interrupt and be impacted differently.
This document is set up in a step-by-step process for the whole unit and/or lesson - depending on how much time is dedicated to it.
