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At Science Skills HS Gateway
English
Students Research Diseases
Teacher collaborates with Gateway's Literacy
and Technology Directors to develop a two-month project
By Jessica Arnold, Literacy Director, Gateway Institute
March 22, 2005
Science Skills Center High School English teacher Sharon Wexler pours through a five inch thick binder of resources she assembled during a disease research project that her 9th grade Gateway English class just completed. Wexler’s planning for this project began at Gateway’s Professional Development day in September, where she learned that both Gateway’s Instructional Technology Director, Lenora Mosby, and Gateway’s Literacy Director, Jessica Arnold, would be working at her school. After consulting with the 9th grade science faculty about connecting a project to the medicine and science emphasis of the school’s Gateway program, Wexler decided to have her students research a disease of their choice. Through this research, students would examine the relationship between physical health and personal and community identity. She then approached Mosby and Arnold about collaborating on a project that would emphasize reading for different purposes, include public and personal writing, and incorporate technology.
Writing was at the heart of the project, and Wexler structured the unit so that students would be expected to write every day, keeping reflective journals, taking notes, writing short responses and writing a final piece that pulled together their research and thoughts. With Arnold, Wexler formulated a series of big questions to pose to the students: what does it mean to be sick? to be healthy? who has access to health care? how do different cultures and communities respond to sickness? “I could have extended this project the whole year, it was so rich and interesting for me and for the students,” said Wexler.
Student selected health problems ranging from cancer and diabetes to mental health and alcoholism. They read a variety of text materials, including literature, public documents, and primary sources, and they developed formal and informal oral language skills through presentations and discussion. Each student conducted and wrote up an interview with a person directly affected by the disease. Before sitting down with their subjects, the class analyzed interview articles in magazines and practiced interviewing each other. Wexler also had personal growth in mind as a central goal for her students. “I wanted this project to help students demystify a health problem that affects a member of their own family or someone in their own community. I wanted students to learn how to learn so that they could feel empowered to get information on their own.”
Lenora Mosby supported Wexler’s efforts to incorporate technology into the project. Mosby helped Wexler identify Internet resources and utilize classroom technology to enhance the students’ learning. As part of their final report, students designed and delivered PowerPoint presentations on their diseases. Wexler enjoyed watching her students take ownership of the material and was very pleased with the quality of the final PowerPoint presentations.
Wexler’s students were also pleased with the project. Esther Martial researched thyroid cancer after learning one of her teachers suffered from the disease. She especially enjoyed reading and discussing newspaper articles and writing a daily log. “I could put down my own thoughts and the progress of my research, and it really helped me think about stuff when I was writing at the end.” Celia Hall, who researched diabetes, enjoyed learning to use PowerPoint. She said the project, “helped me understand what my grandmother goes through and how I can help her. It feels good to know what is going on.”
As Wexler flipped through her binder of resources and student work, she talked about her eagerness to repeat the project with her students next year. She hopes to incorporate film and more diverse literary sources, and make more explicit and frequent connections to the big questions of the project. “It was so helpful having Lenora and Jessica to collaborate with on this project. It may look simple, because it is a series of 30 or so lessons, but it was really very comprehensive and gave students the opportunity to practice so many different forms of reading and writing. I found it truly gratifying.”
Illness and Identity Inquiry Project
Project:
Over the course of the unit, students will investigate the role of illness on individual and community identity. Students will consult a variety of sources including fiction, poetry, and general and scientific non-fiction sources. Students will develop their understanding of illness and identity through reading, writing, discussion, group and individual work.
Big Questions:
The following big questions will guide students to keep the personal, cultural and access issues about illness and will shape students’ thinking about their individual research. Final assessment will require students to respond to one of the questions by constructing a thesis and supporting in with evidence from their project portfolio.
- What is a disease?
- How does being sick shape who you are?
- What is it like to have a disease in one community, country or region compared to another?
- How has access to health care and how does this shape us?
- What cultural remedies and ideas about disease can be found in your culture or other cultures?
Content:
The class will examine the themes of illness and identity as a group and use the following text material to gather information on disease in general and on their specific research topic. Each section of the unit will focus on a different source and students will produce a final document based on that source.
Literature:
- Text sources include: “War’s End” by Jonathan Franzen, “Tell Tale Heart” Edgar Allan Poe, “Christa had a Double Clef Rose” by Mary Clyde, “Krista Had a Treble Clef Rose”, “A Stolen Day” by Sherwood Anderson, “A Day’s Wait” by Earnest Hemingway.
- Describe primary reading strategies: prior knowledge, close reading, finding evidence, discussion, making connections
- Written Product for Portfolio: response writing to individual readings, interpretive essay.
Interviews:
- Text sources include: student selected magazine interview articles
- Conduct and write up practice interviews with peers in class
- Written Product for Portfolio: Conduct and write up primary source interview for I-search
General Documents:
- Text sources include: New York Times and other magazine articles
- Primary reading activities: identifying main ideas, making connections (self, text, world)
- Written Product for Portfolio: Summaries, Article re-writes
Medical Documents:
I-Search
- Written essay covering the process of learning about the selected disease.
- Students describe what they knew about the disease before they started, what they wanted to learn, how they went about doing the research, and what the learned by the end of the project.
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Science Skills Center High School English Teacher Sharon Wexler