Reflection On The Dust Bowl

Our collaborative process in developing our unit planning lessons involved a lot of conversation and a lot of revision. Hope and I began by identifying one of the big themes we saw with our prior knowledge of the Dust Bowl as migration, and how the movement of people and their identities played a role in how events and responses unfolded in the advent of a natural catastrophe. From there, we discovered that we were both passionate about teaching on marginalized histories, and after hearing the statistic that 95% of Americans living in the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl were white, we knew we wanted to focus on the non-white 5%. We identified some problems with this right from the get-go, as the source material we required to teach such …show more content…
I really enjoyed working with Hope – we both have a similar collaborative style which I appreciated, and it was great to bounce ideas back and forth with her to figure out how exactly to make our lesson as best we could. I said this in my last reflection and I will gladly say it again, I love collaboration and group discussion. The collaboration piece in terms of forming a lesson is something new to me, but I can hardly get enough of it, and I hope that I can continue doing that with my peers when I get into the schools. I do feel that it is much easier for me to work with one other person rather than two, as I can sometimes get self-conscious about my ideas if there are louder voices in the room. However, I feel like I work really well with one other person when trying to collaborate and create unique and engaging lessons. As for the discussion piece, that is truly where I feel at home. I love leading discussions, and I love when I can see people getting involved in them and when pieces of information seem to “click.” This assignment seemed to reinforce that idea for me, which I was more than happy about. (It helped that the discussion went so smoothly,