America is Hard to See
Essential Question: What does it mean to be American?
artworks to discuss
connects to ELA, Social Studies
Connects to Social Justice Standards
connects to National Core Art Standards
flexible materials and delivery
“America is Hard to See” is specifically designed for American students. In it, we explore how difficult it is to neatly categorize or define the country’s ethos and inhabitants. Students look to their own backgrounds and communities to explore, identify, and define their particular experience of America while also learning the perspectives of other Americans.
In this integrated project pack, we explore the question, “What does it mean to be an American?” through four key ideas:
- To be American is to draw from more than one cultural background.
- Americans straddle the border of shared community experience with unique mixes of identity, culture, and custom.
- Regional areas, and their history, can be symbolized and understood through their natural features.
- America is defined through the freedom it offers to experience it uniquely.
Each key idea includes a learning segment where students build knowledge and deepen their understanding of a topic area.
A second segment features artworks that support learning and deepen students’ understanding of the diverse ways the idea can be approached.
And finally, each key idea also includes an art project that connects everything together and encourages students to do so in a way that is personally and culturally relevant to them.