The Tikkun Project
Lesson
2
Considering the Most Important Facets of Individual Identities
Concept
Not all facets of a person's identity carry equal weight in helping us understand who they are, and different people may reasonably weigh the same facets differently.
Focus Question
What are the most informative facets of a person's identity, and how do we decide?
Knowledge & Understanding Goals
Language, Strand A (Literacy Connections and Applications), Grade 8: Represent and communicate aspects of personal identity using a visual organizer, prioritizing and justifying significance.
Thinking & Learning Skills
ATL — Self-Management: Self-reflection on personal identity.
ATL — Thinking Skills: Prioritizing and ranking factors; identifying patterns across peers' rankings.
Learner Profile: Reflective, Balanced.
Context
Builds directly on Lesson 1 moves from group-level Set logic to individual identity mapping using Euler Diagrams, generating material students will draw on in Lesson 3's group-strength discussion.
Lesson Outline
NAMING WHAT MATTERS
Open with a short class discussion: "If you wanted to know the most important information to help you understand another person, what would you ask about? Why?" Record the factors and reasoning as a list — likely candidates include culture/religion, nationality, background, interests, family, language, ability. As answers come in, ask students to rank-order the factors by how informative they seem about a person's identity in general, before any self-reflection has happened.
MAPPING OUR OWN IDENTITY
Introduce Euler Diagrams and model how they can visually represent different aspects of identity, using larger shapes for more informative facets and overlaps to show intersections between them. Students create their own diagram, sizing shapes to reflect how informative they believe each facet is about who they are specifically, and thinking about where facets intersect rather than treating them as separate categories.
COMPARING ACROSS THE GROUP
In small groups, students share their Euler Diagrams. After everyone has shared, the group discusses: Are there factors that show up as large or central in many of the individual diagrams — which ones? Looking back at the class's initial ranked list and the group's individual maps together, choose three factors the group believes are most informative about the greatest number of people, and explain why.
REFLECTING ON WHETHER IDENTITY SHIFTS
Individual exit-ticket reflection: Is your identity fixed, or does it shift depending on the situation? Do the same traits feel important to you all the time, or does it depend on the circumstance? Students revisit their Euler Diagram and note, informally, whether any shape would grow, shrink, or move if drawn for a different context (e.g., at home vs. at school vs. with a sports team).
Notes for Teaching and Evaluation
Asking students to rank factors before building their own identity map, and again after, is the same before/after structure used throughout the Tikkun curriculum to make a genuine shift in thinking visible — here it surfaces whether a student's general assumptions about "what matters about a person" hold up once applied to themselves specifically.
The small-group comparison step tests whether an individually-important factor is broadly informative or personally idiosyncratic — the same "does this generalize across cases" logic used elsewhere in the curriculum, here applied to identity facets instead.
The closing reflection on whether identity shifts by context is what keeps the Euler Diagram from being read as a fixed, final statement about who a student is — naming that explicitly prevents the activity from implying a single "true" version of a person's identity, echoing the same lesson Human Set (Lesson 1) already taught about groups having no single correct organization.