As educators, it is our job to ensure all students are provided with opportunities to think critically, be creative, and engage with their community. In Spanish II Heritage, we are evaluating and synthesizing the media and its effect on the community.
Students have been extremely engaged in politics and several other situations that have been occurring in our society recently. This has prompted them to describe their viewpoints in an educated manner and engage with their peers about opposing ideologies. As an educator, I took this level of interest and applied it to our final project. Students will end the year with an in-depth portfolio (reading and writing activities) based on a particular topic that we have covered in class. Being that our course is focused on students who already have a background in Spanish, the portfolio is to be written completely in Spanish. This way students are combining the topics covered throughout the class with the language acquisition goal of the course.
The learning objective of this assignment is for students to be able to demonstrate content mastery of topics covered throughout the semester by evaluating and synthesizing the media and its effects on the community through bias, tone, main idea, and audience. Students are using what they have learned over the course of the year and investigating their selected topic through multimedia news sources. They are then utilizing bias, tone, main idea and audience with support from evidence to defend their reaction to the presentation of their topic in our society.
Our students are taking charge of developing a questioning mind and engage actively in conversations around their community, politics, activism and other related topics. Students have been encouraged to disagree and confront their own bias. As we have worked to complete this assignment, students have impressed me, their peers, and other members of our community with their level of interest and their charge in changing the status quo.