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.
About Me
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I am so excited to be at AHS with you all! As a first year teacher at this school, I look forward to a stimulating, inspiring year of learning together. I grew up right down the road in Dolores, CO and after moved away to continue my education at the University of Denver. Here I bounced around in my studies as I found my passions, landing on a major of English Education with minors in Studio Art and Communication Studies.
It was during this time that I had my first teaching experience in a middle school classroom in China and knew what I wanted to spend my time doing. To continue growing in this area, I moved back here to Durango in 2021 to take classes from Fort Lewis College in pursuit of a Masters degree while teaching at Dolores Middle School. My love of words, language, and the human experience drew me to the humanities and I am eager to share those passions with you. In addition, I love to do all of the typical Durango things; hiking, paddle boarding, rafting, backpacking, and being outside in general. I also paint, read and love spending quality time with the people in my life. Travel has become very important to me as well because it allows me to learn so much about this world we live in; I hope to bring this to the class so we can share in some of those discoveries together! |
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Projects
Socialization and IdentityEssential Questions:
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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?
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. |
