EduCon 2023

For the 3rd year, the Humanities team at The U School is planning common curriculum to be taught across the school. This year, our work is centered around Philadelphia’s mandated African-American history course. This year’s course consists of six thematic units, with short introductory and reflective units at the beginning and end of the year.

To start the 2017-18 school year, U School Humanities educators used inspiration from Opera Philadelphia’s “We Shall Not Be Moved” to create an introductory unit for our Humanities: African-American Lens course. We began by exploring the historical context for the opera, including and considering ways in which history can intersect with our modern lives. Using models from the opera, U School students wrote their own “This Is My Body” argumentative poems.

In this session, U School educators and partners from Opera Philadelphia will share the process they used for planning this curriculum, and U School students will share their work and reflections on the first half of our course.

By reflecting on our inquiry from one specific unit, we will share the process we use for designing all of our units. On our Humanities team, we design around several major principles: learning that is connected to students’ lives, interests, and experiences, rich engagement with social justice topics, rigorous, competency-based assessment, and a design approach to solving real-world problems.