Gary Benedix
Jason Kwong
Louis Toedt
Title: Origins of the Economic Crisis Explained in a Chart
Rationale: This New York Times visual aid was created to help explain to United States Congressmen how the United States housing market and financial sector collapsed in 2008.
This chart explains the many facets that contributed to the economic recession, the United States government bailout of Wall Street institutions, and the collapse of the housing bubble and rise of foreclosures. This visual aid is useful to all learners that may have trouble constructing meaning from the difficult text of All the Devils Are Here.
Assessment: Students understanding of this learning object will be assessed by pointing out the individual bubbles on the chart and asking them how do you interpret each one. For example, you could ask a student, “What 3 factors contributed to the excessive leverage held by financial institutions?”.We would use relatively simple questions that students can answer by “visually discovering” the chart itself; this way we are not expecting them to have backgrounds in economics.
Accessibility: We would use this chart for both preview and review activities. Because it is so surface-level in terms of its explanation of a complex series of events, it can be ideally used first to preview the content of the lesson. After delving deeper into the meanings behind the words represented on this chart, it would also be useful to refer back to the chart once students better understand what they’re looking. The benefit of the chart is that the words used to describe the various causes and events leading up to the recession are as plain as possible. This will hopefully prevent students from feeling too alienated from these topics while still allowing for a deeper analysis to come.
Connections: This learning object, which is a visual representation of the financial collapse, can be connected with our other learning object, the timeline. This is possible because both essentially represent the same information but the chart represents it visually whereas the timeline represents it verbally. This is useful since it helps students to connect what they see to what they read, which is always useful even if your goal is simply reading comprehension.
Keywords: Financial Crisis, Economic Crisis, Recession, Housing Bubble, Foreclosure, New York Times.