During the 2022-23 school year, Kenia sought to revamp her unit, "The Rise of Imperialism and Colonialism" in her 11th grade U.S. History class. Kenia emphasized how excited she was about this set of lessons in particular, as focusing on the 1954 U.S. intervention in Guatemala and El Salvador would provide students with a non-Eurocentric perspective that is rarely presented in most U.S. History curriculum. 

In total, Kenia's lessons took place over the course of three days and culminated in students participating in a role-play cafe mixer. Below, you will find an overarching introduction to the materials and activities Kenia and her students engaged in. Throughout this lesson, Kenia was intentional about creating materials that were reflective of her students' linguistic repertoires, and encouraged students to brave up and stretch their linguistic repertoires to build comunidad, confianza, and complexity in their work.

To introduce students to the historical context surrounding the U.S. intervention in Central America, Kenia builds off of students' prior knowledge about Central America. After building on this background knowledge and providing more context, students were introduced to the cafe mixer activity and were first assigned a historical character relevant to the U.S. occupation in Central America to role-play as. Below is each character's description in both English and Spanish that students were given for this assignment. 

The culminating assessment for this lesson was a cafe mixer activity. Once students gained a strong background and understanding of their assigned character, they role-played as them in the cafe mixer, using their notes as a reference point for sharing with others. Each student was required to interview at least 5 other classmates and answer the guiding questions on the handout below. Throughout this activity, Kenia observed that students were actively stretching themselves linguistically as they spoke to and interviewed one another throughout the mixer.

The following examples illustrate how students prepared for and used their full linguistic repertoire to share their findings. Students' writing and presentations demonstrate their confidence and linguistic fluidity, as well as the ways they were able to leverage their cultural and linguistic assets as they co-constructed knowledge.