Supranational Hypotheticals

This post was written by Caitlin Salerno, an educator at Sun Valley High School and EUnited Fellow at the UNC-CH Center for European Studies, a Jean Monnet Center of Excellence.

by John Schnobrich — from Upsplash

This fall, I’ve been tackling the new World History curriculum that North Carolina has implemented. I’ve felt like I’m a first year teacher again, completely revamping the way I teach and beginning the trial and error of lessons all over again. The new curriculum is thematic, not chronological and intended to be focused on inquiry and historical thinking skills. While I know many teachers would continue to teach lecture style and chronologically as they had for many years, I dove right into this new challenge. Some days I was excited by new lesson ideas and some days I was stumped and frustrated to be creative. I struggled most with the last two units, which were focused on more modern era themes then I had ever taught before. And I was feeling pretty stupid, like nothing I was doing could possibly be good enough. Towards the end of our last unit, I wrote a lesson about supranational organizations. I used all my new knowledge from the EUnited Fellowship to create the lesson. I actually felt confident in what I was teaching. I used the EU as a case study for the students to look at the pros and cons of supranational organizations. After I introduced them to the basic history of the EU, they took a look at multiple sources to gather different support and arguments against belonging to the EU. After learning what they could and weighing all the arguments, they were presented with a hypothetical situation; the countries of South America are considering creating the South American Union, create an ad supporting or opposing the creation using the information you gathered about what the EU does. What was interesting to me as I graded their assignments. Most of them made ads in support. They cited the benefits to the economy, solving mutual crises and ease of travel throughout the continent, as well as other reasons. Their use of the knowledge they learned about the EU really demonstrated that they were learning about supranational organizations. It also gave me quite a bit of hope for the future generation’s desire to work together to make our lives and the world a better or at least more hopeful place.

This post has been created as part of the EUnited Teacher Fellows Program at the Center for European Studies, a Jean Monnet Center of Excellence, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Center for European Studies takes no institutional positions. All views represented within the post are the author’s own