Karen Hansen

This lesson is the first in a series that examines mobility and cascading. Students explore these concepts in the context of biographical stories of real people that involve significant ups and downs in economic status, social position, and health. Then, using an interactive infographic that shows income mobility, students consider unequal patterns in mobility. The lesson aims to show students that social position is more than a snapshot in time. Instead, we can think about strings of events and how policies can play a role in the ups and downs of a life.

Everyone faces obstacles, but the type and severity of the challenges we face depends a lot on where we grow up. In this section, students will read two biographical stories and investigate how place matters in our lives with particular attention to the ways that unequal education systems can produce advantages and obstacles. This section introduces students to the ideas of structural inequality and intergenerational mobility and encourages them to see how blocked chances and additional burdens build up through the course of a life and over generations.

This section introduces students to the array of resources that people use to avoid cascading and downward economic mobility. It then asks students to consider the resources that they have access to in their own lives. Students read biographical stories that highlight different types of resources - such as money, time, friends, family, emotional support, childcare, and unconditional love - and begin to see how not everyone has the same social and economic resources and how collective resources can fill gaps when individual ones cannot.

This section describes life history interviews as a way of collecting data about economic struggle and success. Students read life history interview questions, compare and contrast the answers, and begin to develop the ability to ask in-depth and empathetic questions of peers and adults. They learn to see those around them as having complex lives, full of lessons about struggle, possibility, and support.