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Unit Rationale  

Our goal for this unit is to teach students about compassion in the 21st Century. We

wanted to take this a step further, though, in order to teach students that compassion should

compel us to activism. Our focus on compassion and its relation to activism has encouraged us to

focus our unit on the idea of “compactivism,” a term our cohort has coined in hopes to show

students the strong relationship between the two words. With current social issues, especially in

regards to refugees and immigration, we felt like the text that would help our students best

understand the implications of these issues was ​Refugee​ by Alan Gratz. This text follows three

different characters who all become refugees and have different experiences of displacements

throughout the world. The characters, Josef, Isabel, and Mahmoud, are all from different time

periods and varying parts of the world. Their experiences look different, but Gratz includes

similarities between their journeys and intertwines each character to one another in a unique

way.

The decision behind choosing ​Refugee​ to be our focus text for this unit was based on

several factors, such as the need for civil action in our society. In the 21st century, showing

compassion through simply our words is not enough. There are never enough words that will be

able to fix a legitimate problem. The key to actual change in alleviating various social problems

is being an active citizen and participating in our democracy. This is where activism is important

and highlights how it needs to go hand-in-hand with compassion. To accomplish this change, we

have chosen to use​ Refugee​ to guide our unit in hopes of creating compassionate, active students,

while simultaneously developing their reading, writing, and collaboration skills.


Within our three week unit, we have crafted several lessons to build up compactivism in

our students. The first week of the Compactivism Unit students will focus on compassion in a

general sense as they are introduced to the Alan Gratz’ novel, ​Refugee. ​The first lesson of the

unit will be focused on students building their background knowledge on the novel through an

anticipatory activity. In addition to that, students will craft their own written definition of the

word compassion as it relates to them and their role in a larger global society.

The second week of our unit will focus on compassion as it relates to the novel itself.

Students will dive into the book to see how the characters within the novel do or do not display a

variation of compassion and how that affects the development of the plot. Throughout this week,

students will also be making connections between compassion in the novel and compassion

beyond the confines of the book cover. In another lesson, groups of students will watch several

videos about compassion, in order to make connections between the novel and their own reality.

This lesson aims to provide audiovisuals for students, as well as to scaffold students as they will

be creating their own piece of digital media the last week of the unit. This week will also consist

of students writing an “extended definition” paper on the word compassion and what that looks

like in their own community (Smagorinsky 2008). Students will practice peer editing as they

work on these papers to further engage in collaborative work and to see writing as more of a

process.

The third and final week of the unit will focus on compassion and how that spurs

activism in the lives of the students. Students will be defining activism and focusing specifically

on characters who practiced activism within the novel. The first day of that week will be a lesson

that concentrates on the transition from compassion to activism within the novel. Throughout the
rest of the week, students will be working on their final project. The groups for this project will

be based on interest. Each group will collectively choose an organization that they are passionate

about and create a video that invites others to engage in their chosen form of compactivism for

that organization’s cause.

Within the scope of our unit, we are utilizing multiple avenues of student learning. The

lessons will chronologically and coherently build off of each other and finally culminate into the

final project where students are creating videos to compel others into some form of social action.

Because of this progression from understanding to application to creation, our unit directly

adheres to Benjamin Bloom’s 1956 educational theory--Bloom’s Taxonomy (Anderson 2001).

Bloom’s taxonomy is a hierarchical structure showing the progression of adolescent learning.

This taxonomy is directly shown in our unit because we are tasking students to first remember

and understand. Then students will take that understanding and further it by analyzing and

evaluating it. Similar to Bloom’s Taxonomy, our final step is providing space for students to

create new schemata of the simple concept of compassion, creating a video to justify their beliefs

and compel others.

Students are additionally working together collaboratively in groups throughout this unit

where they will be subject to peer learning. This means that the teacher will not be taking a direct

role in instruction of students, but rather will be helping facilitate meaning construction in

students. This directly adheres to another prominent educational theorist Lev Vygotsky. He

deemed that students learn better through social interaction and that teachers are to take the role

of a facilitator, instead of direct instruction (Vygotsky 1980). Having students define compassion
and then work their pre-existing beliefs into the creation of a new belief also correlates with

Piaget’s theory of cognitive development.

In this theory of Cognitive Development, Jean Piaget argues that adolescents have

schemata, or mental building blocks, of which they store meanings, beliefs, and perceptions

about the world. Each building block is “governed by a core meaning" (Piaget 1936). Due to the

fact that adolescents will have a previously held core meaning of compassion, in this unit, we are

building off of that previously held knowledge. The new knowledge will be then stored and put

in place of the old core meaning because of what Piaget describes as “disequilibrium” (Piaget

1936). This disruption to the students previously held definition of compassion will push

students to a state of mental disequilibrium, where they have to formulate a new definition to get

back to equilibrium. It is clear to see that the instructional principles that guide our unit are

derived from theory and clearly align with North Carolina State Standards.

The standards that align with this unit and our specific assessments include a variety of

skills. To meet the standards, students are required to read, write, gather information from a

variety of sources, engage in collaborative discussions, and create visual representations of their

writing. The lessons and assessments of this unit have been created with the skills outlined in the

standards in mind. In specific lessons, students will practice writing explanatory pieces,

specifically writing about compassion in both the book and in their own lives. This correlates to

standard W.7.2. They will also have to argue what compassion is and is not, specifically through

their writing, which addresses the standard W.7.1. For the formative assessment that highlights

their ability to meet these skills, students will be writing their extended definition papers on

compassion. In this paper, they will also meet the standard W.7.6 through their use of citing
other people’s print or digital work that has helped them come up with their own definition. As

part of the rough draft process, students will have to discuss with their peers the validity of the

sources that they are using. This is another aspect of the standard W.7.6, which asks them to

“​assess the credibility and accuracy of each source” (NC Standards).  

Another aspect of this unit is the discussion and collaboration that students will engage 

in. One of the informal assessments that we are doing in this unit is looking at soundbites of 

compassion and coming up with a class list of what compassion looks like. Students will need to 

collaborate with classmates to come up with a definitive list of what compassion is, eliminating 

the ideas that are not. They will need to work together and discuss what that looks like based on 

their knowledge and experiences of what they believe compassion to be. Students will also be 

engaging in think-pair-shares and collaborative group work in multiple class activities. 

Discussions are key in this unit, as we want students to be reflecting on how compassion and 

activism is relevant to and apparent in their everyday lives. This can be subjective, but we want 

students to be able to learn from one another’s perspectives and ideas about what compactivism 

looks like. 

The summative assessment for the unit, outlined earlier, is the video that students are 

making about a topic they have compassion for, compelling others into activism and getting 

involved. This meets the standard W.7.4 because it is taking students’ ideas about compassion, 

including those outlined in their extended definition paper, and asking them to make that into a 

digital resource that they can publish and get feedback on. Students can create scripts for their 

videos on a Google Doc, allowing them to collaborate, give feedback to one another, and interact 

with others within their group, as well as others in different groups. ​The choice to have the
students create “compactivism” videos as their final assessment for this unit stems from various

theories of education mentioned above as well as support from the National Council of Teachers

of English (NCTE). According to a belief statement from the NCTE,

“teachers should engage literacies as social practices by sponsoring students in digital

writing and connected reading to collaboratively construct knowledge, participate in

immersive learning experiences, and reach out to their own community and a global

audience” (NCTE).

By having students create their own videos about compactivism, they will make meaning of their

own learning. As they actively apply what they have learned thus in the unit, students will make

this new knowledge relevant to their own lives by engaging their community in topics that they

feel passionately about. Although students are not directly engaging in service learning, they are

beginning the steps to a more pragmatic kind of learning in which John Dewey has championed.

Overall, this unit meets many of not only our students’ needs, but also what is required of

them through the state standards and curriculum. Students will be engaging in relevant,

interesting, and developmentally appropriate material. This unit is one that will help our students

understand more about concepts that are specific to their English language arts classroom, as

well as concepts that students will need to have for the rest of their lives. Ultimately, we want

students’ interests to be sparked so that they continue wanting to learn and make a difference in

their community long after this unit ends.


Bibliography

Anderson, Lorin W.; Krathwohl, David R.; Bloom, Benjamin S. (Benjamin Samuel), 1913-1999,

2001

National Council of Teachers of English “Beliefs for Integrating Technology into the English

Language Arts Classroom.” (n.d.). Retrieved from

http://www2.ncte.org/statement/beliefs-technology-preparation-english-teachers/

Piaget, J. (1936). Origins of intelligence in the child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul

Smagorinsky, P. (2008). ​Teaching English by design: How to Create and Carry Out

Instructional Units​. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1980). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes.

Harvard university press.

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