Explore ethnicity and identity with a research and writing assignment. Class members conduct online research, looking in particular at images and carefully noting down their sources on notecards. They read about identity and compose essays that compare the ethnicity and identity that they experience to that of ancient people or the nineteenth century Middle Eastern world.

Concepts

cultural awareness, ethnicity, the middle east

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Additional Tags

ancient near east, middle east, middle eastern art, ethnicity, cultural identity, social studies

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Instructional Ideas

• The plan includes individual activities, but could easily be supplemented with small-group and whole-class discussion of the concepts

Classroom Considerations

• Depending on the length of your class periods, you may want to tell students to focus on two or three steps each day to break up the rather dense assignment page

Pros

• Includes guiding questions for discussion
• Encourages pupils to cite sources and use evidence from their research to support their thesis statements

Cons

• There isn't much scaffolding provided for the essay assignment

Common Core

WHST.6-8.1.a WHST.6-8.7 WHST.9-10.1.a WHST.9-10.7