I don't have the idea fully fleshed out yet, so feel free to make suggestions (and ideas would help too!). Looking at my end goal, I'd like to see three things: students collect information from reliable sources, report the information in paragraph form (if not in full research paper form), and transfer the information into some type of graphic representation. At this point, the idea I have is to put them in small groups, or even pairs. I would like them to research different groups: African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic-American, Anglo-American, etc. I want them to find the answers to several basic questions, the answers to be based on info from the time of the novel (Gatsby), and today.
Questions will be issues like household income, opportunity for education, opportunity for business ownership, commonly held employment, pioneers, etc. So in the end they will get a sense of the difference in opportunities, social and financial, available to different groups since the time of the novel, if that makes sense. For instance, what were the opportunities available to Hispanic Americans at the time? Could they go to any college they wanted? Could they work at any job they wanted? Could they go to any restaurants, stores, events?
Basically, I want the kids to discover and discuss the difference in opportunities available, and transfer that to Gatsby, and theorize what he had to do to get where he ended up and why he did it. They would prepare a 1-2 page report of their findings, and then create a bar or pie graph for each time period, and a Venn diagram for the comparison, I think. The purpose here is to show me they are able to synthesize the info they collect into a visual and written analysis.
You can see it's all still very abstract. I'm worried it doesn't tie together well, but I still like the idea. Any thoughts?
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