What Is the Cycle of War and Peace?

This unit was created by Jeri Johnson, a middle school special education teacher in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, as part of the 2022-2023 Pulitzer Center Teacher Fellowship program. It is designed for facilitation across five 90-minute class periods, with work outside of class.

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

Objectives:

Students will be able (SWBAT) in order to (IOT)…

• SWBAT analyze fiction and nonfiction texts IOT connect narratives to narratives from U.S. history 
  SWBAT analyze the interactions between “characters” in diverse texts IOT explain the relationships that impact societal norms
• SWBAT use graphic organizer(s) to cite evidence from a news story/article IOT analyze the how history develops or repeats itself
• SWBAT use evidence from literary or informational texts IOT write and support analysis, reflection, and research
• SWBAT develop their historical thinking IOT develop and delineate a relevant argument about connections between events in history and current events

Essential Questions:

• What are patterns in cycles of conflict and peace?
• What are  sources of  conflict? 
• Who has been underrepresented in reporting on war? 
• What new understanding do you have about the root causes (and potential solutions) connected to a conflict by elevating underrepresented stories?
• Who/what is agitating this conflict?
• Who/what is helping? How are people surviving/supporting?

Unit Overview:

The cycle of war and peace includes people with power, people who do not know their power, and people who are considered powerless.  This unit will explore the experiences of diverse groups of people who have lived through conflict from WWII through the current crisis between Russia and the Ukraine. Students will use underreported news stories, photo journals, primary sources and current media to analyze how conflict and peace follows an ongoing cycle. They will also evaluate how engaging with underrepresented perspectives on the experiences of war can illuminate the root causes of global conflict and potential solutions.

Students will create a final project that connects stories about communities affected by conflict in the past and in modern times. Students will be given options of which platform to use for their final projects. 

Note for educators: This unit was taught while students were also engaging in independent reading projects. The lessons reference students’ engagement with the books they could select from for their independent reading, but these texts could be replaced with any other texts students focusing on in their classes.

Performance Task:

Students will engage excerpts from books that explore the theme of conflict and peace, a Pulitzer Center reporting resource, and an underreported local story to create a project exploring cycles of conflict and peace. Students will participate in class discussion and activities that will help them to create a digital portfolio of their thoughts and work (e.g. vocabulary, graphic organizers and responses).  Students will then make a connection to at least one of the novels and an underreported story that is found on the Pulitzer Center website (www.pulitzercenter.org) to communicate their reflections on the questions below.

Students will have a choice to create two (2) work products one of which must include a written explanation/essay in response to the essential questions:

• What are patterns in cycles of war and peace?
• What  sources of conflict? Who is involved? 
• Who is not being represented? 
• What new understanding do you have about the root causes (and potential solutions) connected to a conflict by elevating underrepresented stories?
• Who/what is agitating this conflict?
• Who/what is helping? How are people surviving/supporting? 

Required and optional work products can be found on the Flex Learning Choice Board [.pdf] [.pptx] With the focus of “the cycle of war and peace,” students will compare a narrative that was read (fictional or biographical) to an underreported story that is found on the Pulitzer Center website. Students will present their work to the school community during a school-wide community event.

Assessment/Evaluation:

Students will present projects of their choice (e.g. website, podcast, Canva, Adobe, or stop-motion presentations) sharing their perspective on the cycle of conflict and peace. The project should reflect an analysis of the essential questions above and engagement with at least two texts explored during the unit. The final project will be evaluated using the following rubric: Pulitzer EOY Project Rubric [.pdf] [.docx]

Five-lesson unit plan for teachers, including pacing, texts and multimedia resources, guiding questions for group discussions, and performance task instructions and grading rubric for the unit.

Unit Resources:

Common Core Standards:

RI.8.1 Cite the textual evidence that most strongly supports an analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

RI.8.2 Determine a theme or central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including its relationship to the characters, setting, and plot; provide an objective summary of the text.

RI.8.8 Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is sound and the evidence is relevant and sufficient; recognize when irrelevant evidence is introduced.
W.8.9 Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection, and research.

The following examples capture work by students in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania who engaged with this unit plan in spring 2023.

1. Following students' introduction to making personal and current connections to texts about conflicts throughout U.S. history, students engage with the lyrics of the song "In Love and War" by Tamar Braxton to continue building out language for discussing the root causes of conflicts and peace. The following are examples of blackout poems created by students to reflect their understandings of the cycle of war and peace.

2. Students explore reporting from several sources to continue their analyses of the cycles of conflict and peace. Students may also connect with Pulitzer Center-supported journalists to learn more about their process reporting on conflicts that connect to conflict in students' communities. The students who engaged with this unit in 2023 connected with Pulitzer Center K-12 team member Jess Mims and grantee Ngozi Cole to discuss Cole's reporting project, "How a Deadly Fire Exposed Housing Injustice in New York." They explored Cole's reporting while discussing the impacts a recent fire had had on their communities in Philadelphia.

3. Students identified two projects on from a Flex Choice Board to reflect their analyses of the unit's essential questions. Several students ultimately created websites to capture their analyses.

This document visualizes the process a student in Philadelphia took to create an original website capturing their analyses of the cycle of conflict and peace by analyzing a Pulitzer Center-supported reporting project, a novel, and connections to their own communities