The Same Sun Here event that I attended was a panel discussion featuring a senior from South Burlington High School, a middle school English teacher named Mr. Novak, and an eighth grader named Zoe, who all consider themselves activists. Karim, the high school senior, is part of a slam poetry group called Muslim Girls Making Change, that travels and performs in many communities around Vermont and beyond. The English teacher is the adviser of an activism club, and the eighth grader has known from a young age that she is an activist for animal rights, having a strong sense of justice and not being afraid to use her voice.

Activism is one of those words that is spoken and used a lot but not necessarily defined. Therefore, it was enlightening to hear all three of their different definitions of activism. Oftentimes people think of activism as being a large, collective movement, and it can be, but one of the things that really stood out to me about this presentation, was just how individual activism can be. In many ways, activism is like a ripple effect, starting with one individual, and then gaining momentum as others learn about the subject and become passionate about performing such work. Passion was a major trope throughout the presentation, and that anyone can be an activist as long as he or she is passionate about something, and has access to the right resources.

Therefore, as an aspiring future English teacher, it is important to expose students to a variety of readings and resources that cover many social, political, and cultural topics, in order to potentially spark an area of interest and potential passion within a student. It was also enlightening to listen to Mr. Novak discuss the importance of always building students up, listening to their voices, and encourage them to take risks, as another major aspect of activism is confidence- confidence in one's knowledge and passion of the subject, and confidence in approaching the right resources to start making a change. This panel also made me think of the importance of connections, and how as an educator it's important not only to make connections with students, but also to have connections within the school and larger community, in order to connect students with resources for various needs.

This relates to the SMC Mission Statement regarding educators being agents of change as well as "collaborative and knowledgeable instructional leaders" because activism includes collaboration, knowledge, and a passion for igniting change.

Having the opportunity to teach back-to-back mini lessons, while using assessment to adjust instruction in between, truly encompasses the idea of student-centered learning, as feedback from assessments are used to help tailor instruction to students' needs.

Since my unit revolves around the concept of ambiguous language in Macbeth and how it creates multiple interpretations, I chose to teach the the two lessons that would introduce the concept of perception as devised through observation and language, since this is the central idea of the unit that I want students to consider throughout the entirety of reading Macbeth.

When thinking about the ideas of viewpoint and perspective, the two main components are observation and language. Observation includes accounting for the physical appearances of objects and beings that are in a space, while language deals with the words used to describe those observations as well as assign emotion and meaning to those images. The main idea that I wanted students to come away with by the end of Thursday's lesson, is the concept that in order to have a complete perspective or viewpoint of a text, image, or even situation, observation and language must be simultaneously utilized.

In order to scaffold the lessons and provide the necessary supports for students to grasp this more abstract concept of perspective, on Tuesday (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UT1HjVPtbmWvNAvB5WXlApq6jbislSYe8JyMJJzr9pQ/edit) the idea of observation in relation to perspective was explored through the use of QR Codes embedded with various images from the same scene in Macbeth, discussion, and creating images that could be viewed in two completely different ways. 
The students then shared their pieces and were expected to explain what they saw in the pictures before the artist talked about his or her own piece. There were some very different interpretations and the follow-up discussion contained a lot of phrases such as "I hadn't thought about it that way" and "oh I see it now".

On Thursday, the focus of the lesson was to incorporate the component of language. Therefore, two clips from different versions of  the same scene of Macbeth were shown and a Venn diagram was filled out in order to compare and contrast the two. This exercise was to show how even though the language was exactly the same in both versions, the interpretations were completely different- one took place in a hospital and the witches were nurses, while the second took place on the beach and the witches were a mix of all ages and styles. Then an activity was introduced where the students were to create a texting group chat and were given a persona that they had to portray through the text.  Then they were to discuss what they could discern about the person through the text, and what they couldn't. This was to show that the components of language and observation must be used in conjunction with one another in order to fully understand a perspective or view point (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LZ102BRXPo0mSqgTvFiwNrf8Id7A9JQFzS0F8x1EZGM/edit) .

Through these two lessons, I've learned that as an educator, I believe that the content is a bridge to accessing more overarching concepts that will be applicable to everyday life instead of the other way around. The ideas of perspective and viewpoint are important for students to understand in order to become more pragmatic and critical thinkers that are able to see multiple sides and opinions in a situation. I feel confident that my lessons portrayed this sentiment, as discussions were rich and student engagement was high during all activities. Based on feedback , students did believe that I could have taken more time to explain the activities in more depth (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1c2phahrPSeTh5-1rMi5EbnyCx5rav-eWxG0mVmFH_sk/edit).



These lessons relate to the SMC mission statement, as future educators are supposed to be creative and integrate multiple forms of technology for differentiated instruction, which I did through my lessons through QR Codes, using Apple TV, YouTube videos, and through unique activities such as the texting activity and double perspective drawings.