AMERICAN STUDIES Social Responsibilities Unit Assessment

Instructions: The primary focus of this unit is on the idea that the American belief in individualism often conflicts with the belief in sharing social responsibility (i.e., the individual vs. society). Naturally, this will also be the focus of the unit assessment, which consists of two parts.

1. The first task is to complete a community service project and presentation. Your job here will be to complete a minimum of five hours of community service for some sort of nonprofit organization or church, getting an adult’s signature to validate the completion of your service time. Your teachers will provide you with a list of approved possible organizations.

Here are a few questions and issues for you to think about in doing this community service, which you should be prepared to discuss later: what is the nonprofit organization trying to do? What is it providing for society? How is it helping society? How effective is the organization in your view, and what suggestions do you have for ways they could improve their effectiveness in helping the community? How did you help the organization? What was your role? Are we, as citizens, obligated to help people or to volunteer through these organizations? Based on your limited experience, can a country make it without volunteers? Should it be the government’s obligation to provide the service that you and your organization provided? Do we owe it to our country to volunteer? Why or why not? Think of specific examples from your experience.

Next, write a minimum of two pages about your experience. The first page requires that you do a little bit of research, using at least two credible resources, in order to explain the problem your organization is trying to work on. It should include a brief explanation of the issue (e.g., if you volunteer at a food bank, you would research the issue of hunger in America, or if you volunteer at an animal shelter, you would research animal control issues). Discuss what the problem is (including specific facts and statistics), what is being done to alleviate the problem, how effectively we are dealing with the problem in America, etc. You should include a works cited page for this part of the paper and include in-text citations. The second page of your paper should be a summary of your experience, perhaps explaining your thoughts on some of the questions in the previous paragraph above, but at the very least being sure to describe what you specifically did in your volunteer work, as well as how valuable you felt the work was to society and what suggestions you have for ways to solve the problem you worked on.

Finally, create a sales pitch on the topic explaining why people should volunteer or not volunteer to help society. Ideally, this would involve you using your technological skills to come up with a creative advertisement for this topic that could be shown on television or YouTube. If you don’t have access to or skills with such technology, you could instead create a poster or tri-fold board and present it orally to the class. Whatever the format, your ad should include a thesis or catchphrase, it should include visuals and pictures of what you did during your volunteer work (presented in a neat, professional manner), and it should include at least three specific reasons to support your viewpoint. Each reason should be a solid paragraph (100 words or more in length for each paragraph). Even though you will be presenting these reasons orally or on video, they nevertheless must be written out separately as a sort of script.

2. Your second task for this unit assessment will be to write an in-class essay in which you follow the steps of the writing process: prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. When finished, you will turn in an eloquent, thorough, intelligent, insightful essay exploring the question of what is more important – the needs of the individual (whether in action, principles, or morals) or the needs of society (our social responsibilities)? This question should be the central focus of your essay.

In the course of the essay, you are required to cover three major issues: 1) make an argument for when the needs of the individual would seem to outweigh the need for social responsibility, 2) make an argument for when our need for social responsibility would seem to outweigh the needs of the individual, and 3) discuss and explain your personal leaning on the issue and the reasons for it. That is, on the whole, which side do you generally favor? Items 1 and 2 can be discussed in any order, but item 3 should be presented last.

In your discussion, you are encouraged to illustrate your ideas with reference to specific situations and scenarios that come to your mind. In particular, since you have been studying several literary works and historical events/issues that address this topic, you are required to use a minimum of one strong example from one of the literary works and one strong example from the historical events as part of your discussion for each of items 1 and 2 above. For those of you who are weak in math, that means at least two literary works and two historical events will be covered overall. Note: you must choose different historical events than the one used for your research paper.

The depth of your discussion is important. Those who simply scratch the surface in your discussion should not expect much in the way of your grade. In other words, really do some serious thinking about the complexities of the situations you use as examples, and provide evidence for your reader that your brain was working at full throttle.