G7-8 I&S/ G10 History/ MUN Design

/ / Published in Secondary Academic Highlights 2019

G7 I&S: Fighting the First World War

G8 I&S: Stalin’s Soviet Union

G10 History: The Hungarian Revolution

MUN Design: The Social and Economic Council in Afghanistan

For G7 I&S, students learned about how World War One affected Africa and Asia. We used Lake Tanganyika and Qingdao as specific case studies of colonies who were caught up in an imperialist war between their metropoles. We evaluated the role of the Askari who were forced to fight for both the Allies and Central Powers, as well as the Chinese Laborerswhose contributions to the Western Front have largely been overlooked in European text books. Students also worked on their summative project by creating WWI newspapers. This is an interdisciplinary unit with Art as students will write their articles in I&S class and learn how to format and age their newspapers in Art class.

For G8 I&S, students started their new unit on Stalin’s Soviet Union by comparing and contrasting the ideologies of Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Students used their knowledge of the Industrial Revolution that they had learned last year, as a framework to understand the concepts surrounding the bourgeoisie, proletariat, and owning the means of production.

For G10 History, students started their new unit on the Causes of the Collapse of the Soviet Union. We have already extensively studied the American Policy of Containment during the Cold War and we will now shift our focus to Soviet attempts to control theEastern Bloc. We evaluated primary sources surrounding the Hungarian Revolutionincluding speeches by Imre Nagy and documentary footage of the 1956 uprising.

For MUN Design, students are roleplaying as members of the UN Economic and Social Council. Students formed their own groups based upon which task they wished to evaluate in Afghanistan: The Taliban, Opium, the Ring Road, and Women’s Education. Each group wrote their UN resolutions detailing how they will solve their issues, merged them together, and created a budget that addressed each of these issues.

All classes are evaluated using the MYP assessment criteria. The content of the I&S/History classes are based upon the IGCSE standards. Although IGCSE is traditionally taught as a two-year program from Grade 9 to Grade 10, Boston International School begins the IGCSE program in Grade 7 in order to dive deeper into the content and meet the needs of the linguistic diversity of our students.

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