Curriculum reform

Introducing, the Curriculum plan:

“Cultural Competencies: Imagining the Way Forward Through Inclusive Practices, Voices of Resistance, Struggle and Triumph”

This course is a high level curriculum but can be tailored to any high school that aims to teach students beyond the normative history that includes the struggles and triumphs of contemporary minority groups, particularly in the United States, but also the world over. The goal of this course is to teach, foster and apply critical thinking skills that create better informed students and better prepared citizens for the rapidly changing and diverse world around them.

Semester 1

Theme: Minority excellence, exploration, resistance and achievement. To Humanize and Educate students of the struggles and successes that marginalized groups faced while successfully creating community and culture in and alongside the dominant traditional narratives taught. To highlight both the Non European civilizations and technological advancements of disparaged groups in an attempt to actively counteract and complement the traditional historic narratives.  These narratives, though rarely actively taught, continue alongside “normative” historical discussion.  Such survival and resilience that is illustrated deserves celebration and recognition.  Furthermore, this course will foster and provide templates for cross cultural dialogue and seek to enhance the understandings of cultural competencies along with the value of diverse lives and varied lived experiences.

Semester 2

Theme: Where, when, and why did racism, discrimination, and the institutions that promote such come to be? To explore the factors and history that engrained discrimination into our modern civilization and institutions. “3/5 Compromise,” “Ku Klux Klan,”  “States Rights”, “Voting Restrictions”, “Poll Taxes,” “Sunsetting,” “Enslaved Resistance through Culture,” and the attempts at an  “Erasure of Minority History in the United States.” These factors should include the economic environments that lead to institutional discrimination, i.e “Food Deserts,” “Zoning Laws,” and “De-Facto Segregation”-  which laid the foundations for things like Jim Crow post Civil War to continue today. Additionally this semester aims to teach students to recognize, resist and actively disrupt discrimination in their lives despite the morality of those within it or their stated intentions.

Semester 3

Theme: The uphill climb. Redefining American Excellence. To tell the story of the fight against discrimination through legal, economic, and emotional battles, and the brave men and woman who fought them. To celebrate those who truly stood for the ideals of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and dedicated their lives to the proposition that “all men are created equal,” even when those battles were waged against some of the institutions supported by the originators who wrote those famous words. Re-imagining “knowledge.”