Theme

Cultural Studies and Project Work in Middle School A and B integrate theme, language arts, science, and art in a range of projects, including drama, research reports, and creative writing. Guided by essential questions, our work is informed by inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation, and reflection as modalities that ensure deep learning. Reading and writing skills are honed; strategies for reading a variety of genres are stressed. Students are challenged to represent their understanding of concepts in creative and innovative ways. Each discipline informs the shape and content of this interdisciplinary work.

Sixth Grade: Intercultural Awareness: Africa
Enduring Understandings: Culture helps us understand ourselves as both individuals and members of various groups.

Essential Questions:

Who am I and what makes me who I am?
How does where I live shape me?
How does the diversity of African geography and cultural groups impact nation building and cooperation on environmental initiatives?
What societal rules inform rites of passage?
Why was Africa the cradle of human evolution?
What are similarities and differences in the ways groups meet human needs and concerns?
How do we make decisions about ourselves when others often try to define us?
In studying the lives of others, what do we learn about ourselves?

Theme in Seventh Grade: Europe and the Americas
Enduring Understandings: The realities of global interdependence require understanding the increasingly important and diverse global connections among peoples

Essential Questions:

How are decisions interconnected?
How did the needs and ideals of one continent impact and influence the other? How do these needs continue to influence these relationships?
How do past events inform the present?
How do conflict, cooperation, and interdependence among groups, societies, and nations inform us about forces that shape global interactions?
What is race? What is ethnicity? What is the difference?
What do I believe, and how do others see me?
How do changing technologies affect global communities?

Theme in Eighth Grade: Man as the Measure: The World in the Age of Discovery (1400 C.E. to 1600 C.E.)
Enduring Understanding: Many cultures flourished and interacted with one another during the Renaissance. Elizabethan England serves as a microcosm of Renaissance concerns: man’s relationship to God (Reformation); man’s relationship to man (diplomacy, trade, exploration, conquest); and man’s relationship to nature (science, perspective and realism in art). (In 2010-2011, the rotation will change to “We, the People in the United States Today”)

Essential Questions:

How did the many flourishing cultures (Asian, African, Near Eastern, Native American, and European) of this era contribute to the economic, artistic, and technological vitality of Europe and each other?
How did the mechanisms of trade, war, diplomacy, exploration, and discovery impact contact between cultures?
How did a new interest in the classical world of ancient Greece and Rome result in the formulation of new ideas about art, education, politics, science, and technology?
How did the philosophy of humanism impact religion and scholarship in the Renaissance period?
How did the Protestant Reformation and the Counter Reformation change the politic, social, and religious landscape of Europe and the Americas?
How did the Scientific Revolution change the way people understood and explored their world?
How do Christopher Columbus and his legend symbolize both the spirit of heroism and the costs of colonization?
How does the work of Shakespeare capture the realities of life in Elizabethan England and mirror the concerns of the era?

To see the complete theme sequence from preschool through eighth grade, click here.