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.

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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

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! 

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.

Sankofa

Enduring Understanding: Students will understand that…
  1. Knowledge of the past helps one understand the present and make decisions about the future.
  2. Examining social and civic issues helps to expand one’s understanding of the world, its people, and themselves. 
  3. We all have a role to play in making the world we want to live in. ​
Essential Question:
  • In what ways can the past guide us in creating a strong and just future?
Sub Essential Questions: 

  • How do refuge and resistance both define the history of Bears Ears? 
  • What methods of resistance do you think we should take with us from the past (in other words, which methods were more justified, effective, and authentic to you?)
  • How does understanding the past help us form a more informed decision on today’s issues? (i.e. the monument controversy?)
Spring Semester Part 1:
Sankofa (pronounced SAHN-koh-fah) is a word in the Akan Twi and Fante languages of Ghana, that can be translated to mean, "go back to the past and bring forward that which is useful." The Sankofa bird is represented as twisting its beak behind itself, in order to bring forth an egg from its back. The Akan believe the past serves as a guide for planning the future.

​Connecting the past with the present allows us to better understand the forces that will have an impact on our collective future as citizens of this planet. In looking back, we can honor those who have shown us the way and taught us strategies for resilience, creative problem-solving, and collective well-being.  At the same time, we must not look away from the parts of our past we may find unpleasant, lest we repeat the mistakes of those who came before. 

In the Socialization and Identity Project last semester, you spent a lot of time looking back on your own personal past and the forces of socialization that impacted who you are. The goal was to enable you to use that past understanding to have more control over who you want to become as an individual.  NOW, we’ll zoom out and look at our collective past.

Why Shakespeare?

Essential Questions:
  • Why Shakespeare?  Why, 400+ years later, does the literary world still return to these plays as the pinnacle of human creativity in the English language?  (Why are so many people, including your teacher, so obsessed and enamored with these works?)
  • ​How does telling stories through performance differ from written storytelling?
  • How can Shakespeare (and stories in general) be adapted across space and time for many audiences?
  • ​What “21st Century” skills and dispositions does it take to collaborate with many people on a large-scale task with lots of moving pieces?
​Spring Semester Part 2:
In this project, you will become something of a Shakespeare scholar.  Shakespeare DID NOT write these plays so that high school students would struggle through them as books!  They are not meant to be read inertly!  We will dig in to several plays, mostly through performance by actors (ourselves and others).  We will study one play in depth and produce it as a metatheatrical shadow puppet show, using Shakespeare’s words and our vision.  You will collaborate with your peers to accomplish the many parts of this complicated task: script-cutting, directing, acting, puppet and set design, lighting and tech, sound recording and editing, publicity and documentation. You will each become players yourselves, voicing at least one part in the final soundtrack.  For all of this, you will need to understand the Shakespeare, and you will….