This summer, Eunice Greer and Elaine Mariolle will co-teach a Middle School
methods course at the University of Illinois in Champaign,
Illinois. The course is intended for classroom teachers and pre-service teachers. It will meet
Monday - Thursday, 1:00 - 3:30, July 8 - 31. A large portion of the coursework will focus on
middle school curriculum design and implementation.
Students will work in teams of eight to development of a piece of rigorous, integrated curriculum. Activities will be designed to teach middle school students various data collection, interpretation, syntheses and presentation skills. Successive activities will buld on one another and will culminate in a comprehensive final project. The topic of these activities will be Route 66. Data collection methods will include investigative journalism, photo-journalism, quantative data collection, and historical research (examining primary sources and artifacts and dealing with issues of authentification). Students will leave the course with a model of how to design an integrated curriculum project to investigate cultural icons. They should be able to generalize what they have learned to other cultural icons of interest. Other topics might include the Missippi River, The Great Wall of China, The Empire State Building, The Golden Gate Bridge, and Baseball.