Alexie, Sherman. "Superman and Me." Los Angeles Times, !9 April 1998. 11 ed. McGraw-Hill, 2011.
This year in English, we were introduced to this story of a very gifted Native American who is pushing for the betterment of self-determination and education of first nation youth. In his article, he highlights the lack of will of the students to excel as opposed to the skill level they are actually on. Instead of complacently accepting a lower status, his plea is to fight to live, and by that he means learn. This fits under the Communicate Ideas pillar because it is a clear stance from a primary source that effectively explains the difficulties faced by native people as they grow older. Alexie urges his youth to give themselves more of a chance, to learn, to live. |
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After we finished our unit that focused on cultural appropriation and Native Americans in our English class, we had a cumulative Socratic seminar to connect all the ideas and themes of our studies. Each person was asked to choose one of the writings or films we analyzed to use as a basis of the talk; I chose Black Panther. We talked about how the lines between portraying a culture and appropriating it could be crossed and respected and how each platform did that. We also were asked question from Cooper about how this misrepresentation went in the first place. By having us all communicate the ideas we had been studying for the bast few months, we were able to cross boundaries from different platforms and create an integrated understanding of what happens when cultures interact and how we can be more conscious as citizens of our own and other's cultures.
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For History homework, each table group had to research and make a short presentation over battles fought among the American government and Western Tribes. This style of teaching forces the student to become the master of a subject in order to inform others, giving them a better understanding. Our group presented about the Fetterman Massacre, and we learned from other groups about incidents such as The Dawes Act and The Dakota Wars. This demonstrates ideas by allowing the students to communicate history to each other so that everyone can understand the historical events, especially relevant to Native American history with the government.
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AMSCO's are guided reading which put the information from our History textbook into a condensed space so that we can gather the most information for the AP test. This one included a lot of information about Andrew Jackson and how he contributed to the movement of Native Americans from their homelands. This demonstrates communicate ideas by letting us know the information in a smaller format while also giving us examples of how the ideas of history were conveyed in the time. By showing us how Indian removal was presented, we can see how communication played a role in support and resistance to it due to the motives of Americans and the Natives that had to relocate. This passage also includes other events that occurred synonymous with the ideas.
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