Banished but Unbowed: An American Legacy

This unit was created by Heather Renée Ingram, a high school English teacher in Chicago, IL, as part of the 2021-2022 Pulitzer Center Teacher Fellowship program. It is designed for facilitation across approximately four weeks.

For more units created by Pulitzer Center Teacher Fellows in this cohort, click here.

Unit Objectives:

Students will...

• Research a given topic via various textual and non-textual sources
• Compose an expository essay, paying particular attention to thesis statements, developing introductory context, analysis, and meaningful conclusion
• Engage in a learner-led formal discussion
• Create a digital presentation that explores the history and contemporary reality of select Land-Grant Universities

Unit Overview:

“...she was talking about how the place where she’d grown up in Oakland had changed so much, that so much development had happened there, that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone, there was no there there anymore.”

Tommy Orange, There There

Eminent domain. A euphemism for “Get out.”

When the residents of Chavez Ravine were told by the ‘City of Angels’ that their hard-earned homes were slums and would be torn down to make way for subsidized housing, the news was wrenching but not without precedent. Through law and lawlessness, America’s storied history is littered with tales of forced displacement. Settler Colonialism. The Weeping Time. Japanese Internment. Redlining. The list goes on. Because of the often covert and insidious nature of racialized discrimination, claims of injustice are often hard to prove. The loss of land, however, can be quantified. 

In Banished but Unbowed: An American Legacy, students journey through historical points of displacement and dispossession. Such stories are, at best, underreported; at worst, they are systemically erased. In a scholarly sense, then, the who and when are as important as the how and why. No matter the instance, the impacted lives have been deemed ‘outsiders’ to America's social context and physical landscape. This paradox of rendered invisibility is both cause and effect–’ they’ are ‘other’ and, therefore, rendered invisible….’ they’ are invisible, and thus rendered ‘other.’ 

By diving into the humanity of the ‘other’ through a range of literary and informational texts, students confront these sobering historical truths. Ultimately,  tracing this trajectory leads us to contemporary communities and their continued ability to resist while thriving. In this space, students are engaged and empowered by tangible examples of the human capacity to overcome. This lesson, at once personal, academic, and civic, positions students as conscientious, empathetic, global learners. 

Performance Task:

Student-curated Digital Presentation
Students work together to create a digital museum that identifies tribal communities displaced by The Morrill Act. The website will have a home page that explores the background and history of The Morrill Act and Land-Grab Universities. The website will also include a handful of pages exploring unique universities that benefited from The Morrill Act and the Indigenous communities they displaced.

Four week unit plan, including warm-ups, classroom activities, texts, music, graphic organizers, and performance tasks for the unit.

Unit Resources:

Note: This unit has a robust range of resources that are not included in this table. Please review the unit to see all the resources that were thoughtfully curated to offer students a rigorous exploration of dislocation in America.

Common Core State Standards

English Language Arts Standards (Grades 11-12)

CC.11-12.W.2 Text Types and Purposes: Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas, concepts, and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.

CC.11-12.R.I.7 Integration of Knowledge and Ideas: Analyze various accounts of a subject told in different mediums (e.g., a person’s life story in both print and multimedia), determining which details are emphasized in each account. 

CC.11-12.R.I.1 Key Ideas and Details: Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences are drawn from the text.

Learning for Justice Social Justice Standards

• Students will develop positive social identities based on their membership in multiple groups in society. 
• Students will develop language and historical and cultural knowledge that affirm and accurately describe their membership in multiple identity groups.
• Students will respectfully express curiosity about the history and lived experiences of others and will exchange ideas and beliefs in an open-minded way.
• Students will respond to diversity by building empathy, respect, understanding and connection.
• Students will recognize unfairness on the individual level (e.g., biased speech) and injustice at the institutional or systemic level (e.g., discrimination).
• Students will analyze the harmful impact of bias and injustice on the world, historically and today.
• Students will express empathy when people are excluded or mistreated because of their identities and concern when they themselves experience bias. 
• Students will recognize their own responsibility to stand up to exclusion, prejudice and injustice.

Formative Assessment:

Students will complete a routine dialectical journal entry, analyzing the range of media and text explored throughout the unit.

Summative Assessment:

Students will use dialectical journal entries created throughout the unit to explore the essential question “What are the causes and consequences of prejudice and injustice, particularly as they pertain to issues of land?” Students will also use the following guiding questions throughout the conversation:

Student-Curated Digital Presentation

Students work together to create a digital museum that identifies tribal communities displaced by The Morrill Act. The website will have a home page that explores the background and history of The Morrill Act and Land-Grab Universities. The website will also include a handful of pages exploring unique universities that benefited from The Morrill Act and the Indigenous communities they displaced. 
For an example of a completed student-curated digital museum visit The Legacy of Land Grab Universities Through an Equitable Lens.