Welcome to this web page that highlights the Curriculum Unit created for the Social Studies Methods at UW-Madison. This unit surrounds American Indians and the appropriate ways to represent American Indians in the classroom context. As a major source of information and guidance through this assignment, I worked very closely with Ryan Comfort in the UW-Madison American Indian Curriculum Services (AICS) to help make sure that the pedagogy and content was both accurate and authentic. The result is a 22-lesson constructivist unit that pushes the students to begin thinking about American Indians not as a people of the past, but rather of a group that lives among us today and offers more to the community than the traditional contributions that most people think of.
Guiding Essential Questions
The following questions were the manner in which the entire unit was planned and hold the entire unit together. Without each of these questions, the unit would have not resulted in the manner that it did. These questions are the result of both my own thinking about the unit and also, the planning of the unit as it went. These were the main goals from the beginning but needed some revision and fine-tuning as the unit direction became more and more clear.
- Who are American Indians today?
- What is prejudice and how does it affect the way we look at American Indians
- How can an understanding of American Indians today help us understand our shared history?
