Big Era Nine: Landscape Unit 9.7

Why This Unit?

This unit has two major goals. First, students will develop a general understanding of the role of culture in the decades following the Second World War. The unit does not present an exhaustive list of widely-recognized, specific cultural figures. The Beatles, for example, are mentioned but not examined. While the unit defines culture broadly, specific examples of culture are drawn almost entirely from artistic and musical developments. Language is briefly examined, but religion, sports, and other elements of culture are left out. The unit takes this approach partially because no list of cultural developments can hope to be complete. Partially, as well, it does so because the unit asks students, above all, to explore not just what culture is, but what culture means. As Big Era 9 ends at the present, students will connect recent history to their own place in the world.

A second goal of the unit is to develop all students as thinkers and writers. The unit is designed around a series of questions. The unit poses a general Big Question: "Have popular cultural developments in the world since 1945 become more democratic or less so?" From there, students gather data and develop ideas in a series of more specific Focus Questions. These questions, and the data students use to respond to them, are related to each other as would be the ideas in a well-structured essay. Along the way, the unit prompts students to write sentences which, when reorganized and revised, will form just such an essay. The best writers in the classroom will benefit from the unit's probing questions and reminders of how to structure ideas. The less-developed writers, however, will use the unit's scaffolding to create what may well be for some of them the best essay they have ever written! The unit teaches partly that all of our students can write essays, if they get the guidance they need to do so. This unit provides that guidance.