Last updated: July 22, 2019
Lesson Plan
Lesson 1 - THE CULTURE CONCEPT
- Grade Level:
- High School: Ninth Grade through Twelfth Grade
- Subject:
- Literacy and Language Arts,Social Studies
- Lesson Duration:
- 90 Minutes
- Common Core Standards:
- 11-12.RH.2, 9-10.RI.1, 9-10.RI.2, 9-10.RI.7, 11-12.RI.10
- State Standards:
- LOUISIANA HISTORY STANDARDS
Standard 1: Historical Thinking Skills - Thinking Skills:
- Understanding: Understand the main idea of material heard, viewed, or read. Interpret or summarize the ideas in own words. Evaluating: Make informed judgements about the value of ideas or materials. Use standards and criteria to support opinions and views.
Essential Question
What is culture?
How has culture shaped you?
How can the study of culture empower you to act within your culture to both preserve it and to bring about positive change?
How will you reflect the cultures that shaped you, and how will you change them?
How does music reflect culture?
Objective
Introduce students to Cultural Anthropology.
Introduce students to key terms in the study of culture.
Introduce students to the stages of ethnographic fieldwork.
Background
This curriculum is based on the collaborative ethnography Talk That Music Talk: Passing on Brass Band Music in New Orleans the Traditional Way, by Bruce Sunpie Barnes and Rachel Breunlin, published by UNO Press in 2014. Visit https://www.neighborhoodstoryproject.org/talk-that-music-talk for information on obtaining the book and a full book of lesson plans. Through the book and the lessons, students will study the intergenerational mentoring that takes place in New Orleans between musicians, and the role these relationships played in the Civil Rights Movement and in contemporary community organizing. In the curriculum, we ask young people to consider how New Orleans shares some histories of segregation with the rest of the country, but also defied it.
Talk That Music Talk: A Teacher’s Guide to Music, Culture, and Social Justice in New Orleans is designed to engage high school students in learning about the history of how civil rights developed alongside music in the city, but also to develop in-class assignments and projects that will engage them in their own histories and contemporary experiences. In this curriculum, we ask them to look back as well as forward to help them develop their own voice, and contribute to broader collectives
As young people come of age, they often experience tensions between the traditions they are inheriting and their own desires to create new ways of being. The struggles around the old and the new occur in every generation. They manifest themselves in all art forms as well as social justice struggles. As teachers, our job is to help our students recognize what is happening and help them develop their own voices. We can ask them, “How will you reflect the cultures that shaped you, and how will you change them?”
Preparation
- Teachers should obtain a class set of TALK THAT MUSIC TALK, and a copy of
- Talk That Music Talk: A Teacher’s Guide to Music, Culture, and Social Justice in New Orleans, https://www.neighborhoodstoryproject.org/talk-that-music-talk
- The lesson plans are laid out here, and can be done without purchase of the lesson plan book, though the book gives additional explanation.
- Lessons cannot be properly done without the book TALK THAT MUSIC TALK due to the need on interview transcripts and photographs.
Materials
Handout of Will Hightower's Stages of Fieldwork
Download Handout of Will Hightower's Stages of Fieldwork
A Classroom Discussion Guide with Key Terms
Download TEACHING THE CULTURE CONCEPT:
DISCUSSION HINTS: LESSON 1 -BOOK INTRODUCTION
Download DISCUSSION HINTS: LESSON 1 -BOOK INTRODUCTION
Lesson Hook/Preview
Initial interest can be created by distributing copies of the book TALK THAT MUSIC TALK; PASSING ON BRASS BAND MUSIC IN NEW ORLEANS to students. It is a beautiful book with wonderful photographs. The book itself should create interest.
Procedure
- Ask the class to take five minutes and do a quick “free write” on what comes to mind when they think of New Orleans jazz and brass bands. In a “free-write” you don’t have to worry about spelling or punctuation. You don’t have to edit yourself. You just need to get your first thoughts down on paper.
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After they brainstorm, ask the class to share some of their responses, and help them track their thoughts by writing them on the board. As follow-up questions, you can ask:
- Who has had a personal experience with brass bands and second line parades?
- When you think of the music, who listens to it? Who plays it?
- Are there different kinds of brass band music and how would they define the different styles? • How are brass bands related to the history and culture of the city? What can we learn about both by learning about them?
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After the discussion, read the introduction in Talk That Music Talk, “Music for All Ages: Towards a Collective Voice” together. Each student can take a paragraph to read out-loud for a shared experience.
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After reading introduction, engage in further discussion. The purpose of the discussion is to familiarize students with the book to prepare them for the remainder of the unit. .
The following questions will help the students understand how the book was put together and help them understand some of the terms used throughout the chapters. The questions are also found under LESSON PLAN MATERIALS along with answers to the questions.
- How are all the people in the book connected?
- What did the older musicians and activists want to share with the book project and what did the younger musicians want to talk about?
- How did the young people learn the music?
- What was the chosen method of teaching music and why was it important?
- Why are parades a special part of learning music in New Orleans?
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Explain to the students that the immersion process that the young musicians went through is similar to what anthropologists do to learn about a new culture. The book was written as a collaborative ethnography: a written and visual description of a culture that was created with the people who are in the book. Everyone had a chance to edit their own chapters and contribute new things to it. Explain to students that they will be introduced to some of the core concepts in anthropology before getting further into the book.
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CONTINUE DISCUSSION:
Using the “Teaching the Culture Concept” guide, lead students through class discussion to help them grasp some of the foundational concepts of cultural anthropology and its main method of inquiry, ethnography. See LESSON PLAN MATERIALS.
Have the students break into pairs and read Will Hightower’s chapter in Talk That Music Talk. Afterwards, they can work together to answer the questions on the worksheet. If time permits, the class can discuss their answers together. See worksheet WILL HIGHTOWER’S STAGES OF FIELDWORK under LESSON PLAN MATERIALS.
Vocabulary
• Culture: The customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group.
• Cultural Anthropology: The social/scientific discipline that deals with human culture especially with respect to social structure, language, law, politics, religion, magic, art, and technology
• Ethnography: A form of qualitative research also known as participant observation involving direct participation in the culture, field notes, and in-depth interviews.
• Entrée: The ethnographer’s entrance into the culture under study.
• Culture Shock: Upon entrance into a new culture, a disorientation based on a loss of familiar cues. Reactions can include shyness, homesickness, or anger.
• Cultural Relativity: Developed by anthropologist named Franz Boas, it is the concept that each culture must be understood on its own terms, not on those of outsiders.
• Ethnocentrism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one's own ethnic group or culture, and the tendency to view alien groups or cultures from the perspective of one's own.
• Social Construction: The concept that culture is learned, not biological, and that one born anywhere in the world could be relocated to another culture and learn the language, customs, dances, and music as easily as a child born to parents from that culture.
• Historical Particularism: Concept of Franz Boas that we need to look to the past to understand culture today, and that traditions, rituals, music, etc. change over time as they are affected by events.
• Code-switching: The practice of moving from one way of speaking to another as we move between cross-cultural settings such as generations, classes, ethnicities, etc.Rubric/Answer Key
RUBRIC
1 2 3 4 5 The story was of the proper length.
1 2 3 4 5 The story was set in the proper time period and included only technology that existed in ante-bellum days.
1 2 3 4 5 This section will be counted twice. The story showed an understanding of the true difficulties faced by enslaved persons as they attempted to gain their freedom.
1 2 3 4 5
The story had a minimum of grammatical and spelling errors. Total points ______ times 5= final grade of __________