CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. (CLARKSVILLENOW) – For the past year, Whitney Joyner, a CTE/STEM teacher at Northeast Middle School in Clarksville, has been working on Understanding Sacrifice, a program designed to re-imagine the teaching and learning of World War II.
This teacher’s fallen hero profile and lesson plan has been published on the program’s award-winning website.
Ms. Joyner met her featured soldier’s family in Banner Springs this month to read the eulogy at a memorial service for him. Next week, she leaves for the National Council for Social Studies Conference in San Francisco, where she will present her lesson there.
Designed to reinvigorate the study of World War II in American classrooms, the lesson plans are multi-disciplinary. Using primary and secondary sources, videos, and hands-on activities, students are transported from the modern-day home front to the war front of the past. Joyner’s lesson plan is based upon solid primary and secondary source research.
“My lesson gives teachers an opportunity to teach World War II through a cross-curricular approach, zeroing in on how war inspires new technologies and can be connected to science and math,” Joyner said. “Not all deaths in a war are a result of combat. Atkinson did not die on a battlefield or even in foreign waters, but his story, service, and sacrifice are given meaning through remembrance and the telling of his story.”
Watch more about Joyner’s research below: