Welcome!

9th grade Humanities, Civilizations and Cultures, explores questions regarding the individual's relationship with civilization, society, and government.  As a humanities course, this class focuses on integrating language arts skills, historical thinking skills, and skills and perspectives found in other humanities and social science disciplines.  Through a variety of genres, both fiction and non-fiction, students participate in thematic projects related to local and global contemporary issues.  This thematic, project based, exploration continues through coverage of crucial topics in ancient through early modern (18th century) history.  Students examine these content areas through various humanities and social science discipline perspectives including history, sociology, psychology and philosophy.  Students completing this course will interact with a variety of perspectives that help them interpret and understand the complex relationship between society and the individual.
Through the humanities we reflect on the fundamental question: What does it mean to be human? The humanities offer clues but never a complete answer. They reveal how people have tried to make moral, spiritual, and intellectual sense of a world in which irrationality, despair, loneliness, and death are as conspicuous as birth, friendship, hope, and reason.

Projects

Socialization and Identity 

Essential Questions:
  • How is my identity constructed?
  • How do social forces and personal choice interact in the construction of identity? 
  • How can an individual break the harmful cycles of socialization and reinforce the positive cycles of liberation?
​Fall Semester:
Have you ever thought about how everything we know and believe has been formed by our interactions with other people?  What we wear, the careers we choose, and the people we spend time with, how we treat each other, the language we use, our core values, and just about everything else has been learned from others.  So how much personal choice really goes in to shaping our identities?
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In this project, we will explore the concept of identity through the lens of Sociology. Wikipedia defines sociology as “the scientific study of society, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and culture.”  We will study how human beings are socialized into their culture through a variety of social forces that influence the people we become and how this interacts with our personal freedom to create our own identities. We will also look at how socialization can reinforce harmful cycles of thinking and behavior and how we, as individuals, can liberate ourselves from them.  The project will culminate in the creation of individual identity masks and reflective essays that illuminate our take-aways from our sociological inquiry.