Grades 9-12 Instructional Units

Our students live in an age of blurred lines between fact and fiction due to the influences of social media, reality television, etc.; this type of mentality often follows them into the realm of academics. A comment I hear often around Health Sciences Charter School (HSCS) is, "Miss, it's not that serious!" They also say, “You do too much.” Well, when it comes to ethics and journalism... it IS that serious and journalists SHOULD do too much if they want their subjects to trust them enough to give good information. Journalists need to prove that they have integrity, honesty, and good values and will present the information in a fair and truthful way. In this unit, students experience a hybrid module involving digital instruction as well as hands-on practice gathering journalistic facts in the form of a scavenger hunt, which is used to write a news article.

What are ways to motivate students to write in art? Within the unit inspired by the Americans Who Tell the Truth portrait series about artist Robert Shetterly, students gain the understanding that their individual voices, once harnessed, have the power to create change. The “Americans Who Tell the Truth: Models of Courageous Citizenship” unit explores the concept of identity using portraiture. It exposes students to people, both historical and current, who exercise their influence and voices to become catalysts for social, environmental, and/or political justice.