Connect!

We can - if we are willing to think creatively.

During the first term of the school year I had the privilege of teaching the inaugural class of the World@War elective here at CSS. History, of warfare in particular, has always been a very popular topic among my students (mostly male). As a topic that I am also very passionate about, I decided to combine the demand for history with avid interest in popular media representations of the war to give rise to this completely independent, inquiry driven course.

Students were challenged to propose projects that had to be focused on a major conflict from recent human history (500 years), and had to include the following media types as resources:
• Documentary Film
• Period Film (from the time of the conflict, if possible)
• Feature Film
• Variety of online resources (full MLA works cited list required)
• Video Game (Call of Duty series, Battlefield, Minecraft, etc.)

Students worked in small groups (3-4) to determine the focus of their project, and to complete the proposal. It was up to students to decide what the guiding question of a project would be, and to focus on what their essential understandings would have to be in order to answer their question.

The trimester flew by. Every second day my room was filled with students watching films on their laptops with headphones, editing the footage from their own gameplay to use in their documentaries comparing the real Battle of Stalingrad with the campaign challenge from the game Call of Duty World at War, and pouring over research notes on the tactics used throughout the Korean War. Other students chose to take a different direction and looked at genocide in Rwanda, French Revolution, and the history of weaponry throughout the two world wars up to today.