Assignment Overview
Sheet
NAME_____________________
McKinley High School: Reframing Narratives
“Sidewalk Science” to take place during lunch shifts on Wednesday, 9/9/15
Assignment Overview
WHAT: For this assignment, you will work as a team to gather, organize, and
make an interactive presentation.
WHEN: These interactive presentations will take place during lunch shifts on
Thursday, 9/10/15 (and yes, we’ll provide lunch).
WHY: Your challenge is to get other students, teachers, and McKinley visitors
thinking critically and talking back to overly simplified narratives that circulate
about our school.
Curricular Connections
We have been exploring how values, contexts, interests, and points of view
frame what people know, how they communicate what they know, and what they
do with it.
Examples we have studied recently:
 Richard Pratt, who argued that American Indian Boarding schools were
opportunities for “savages” to become “civilized”, framed the purposes and
practices of these schools in the late 19th and early 20th century.
 In his landmark study, The Philadelphia Negro (1899), W.E.B. Du Bois
reframed the so-called “negro problem” to shed light on the historic impact
of unjust systems on almost all aspects of African American life
(education, housing, employment, health care, etc.).
Reframing McKinley High School
Like Du Bois, our task is to examine how knowledge about McKinley High School
is framed by those participate in and experience the school on a regular basis.
We will compare and contrast that lived-knowledge with how the school is viewed
in the larger society.
These broad questions provide the direction for our study:
1) How is knowledge about McKinley framed for the larger society? In other
words, what characterizes the dominant narrative about the school?
2) How do people at McKinley experience the school in ways that complicate
or add to the school’s dominant narrative?
You will work in groups to gather data on the following sub-topics and
using the following methods:
Group/s
Sub-Topic
Method
1&2
Counter Narratives:
o Capture the responses of people at the school on
Speaking back to
portraits using white boards.
standardized tests
o Suggested prompt: “What a test score can’t say about me
is…”
o Code and organize the responses by themes
o Present the portraits and themes in a creative way during
the “Sidewalk Science”
o Collect more portraits during the “Sidewalk Science”
3&4
Counter Narratives:
o Capture the responses of people at the school on
Speaking back to
portraits using white boards.
overlyo Suggested prompt: “What you should know about
simplified/negative
McKinley is…”
perceptions about the o Code and organize the responses by themes
school
o Present the portraits and themes in a creative way during
the “Sidewalk Science”
o Collect more portraits during the “Sidewalk Science”
5
Rhetorical Analysis:
o Analyze the most recent school report card using the
School report card
critical reading toolkit
o Design a visual presentation that shares your analysis
with the audience (you may draw from what the class has
already done)
o Come up with a way for your audience to share their
insights and feedback during the “Sidewalk Science”
6
Rhetorical Analysis:
o Identify media coverage about the school from recent
Media coverage
years, choose a few samples
o Analyze the coverage using the critical reading toolkit
o Design a visual presentation that shares your analysis
with the audience
o Come up with a way for your audience to share their
insights and feedback during the “Sidewalk Science”
7
Historical Analysis:
o Read about the history of the school
McKinley’s past
o Analyze the significance of the school’s history as it
relates to our guiding questions
o Design a visual presentation that shares your analysis
with the audience
o Come up with a way for your audience to share their
insights and feedback during the “Sidewalk Science”
Have drafts ready in class on Tuesday, 9/8.
Final presentations on display during lunch on Thursday, 9/9.