AFFINITY DIAGRAM

What is Internment?

      What would it be like if you and your family were told to pack your belongings and relocate to an unknown location?  This happened to many Japanese, Ukrainian, German and Italians who lived in North America during World War II, even though they were upstanding citizens who had not broken any laws.  This treatment is called internment, or detention without a trial. We would like to think this would never happen to citizens today; yet in the wake of 911, the government has once again felt the need to intern certain citizens.

  Now that you have briefly discussed examples of Internment in class with your teacher, it is time to develop a deeper understanding of what the term internment implies. We will do this by completing an Affinity Diagram.

 An affinity diagram is a graphic organizer that helps you gather a lot of ideas and organize the ideas into natural groupings.  The affinity diagram taps into both sides of the brain: the right side of the brain will generate the ideas and the left side of the brain will work to analyze and organize the ideas.   

  Steps for Creating an Affinity Diagram

For this activity, you will work in small groups using a combination of writing paper and the program Inspiration. Individually, you will write as many words, ideas or phrases you can think of that relate to the term Internment. There should be no discussion... just thinking and writing. You will write each of your of words or phrases onto a sticky note. You will have approximately 5 minutes to do this.

Once the brainstorming step is completed, the group members will reveal their list of words and then as a group quietly organize your words into natural relationships at your work table or on the board (example: people, places, rationale, history, present day, etc). Once your group has agreed on categories, move to the iBook computer and open Inspiration.

Using Inspiration, you are going to create an Affinity Diagram. Each category should be typed as a main idea.  Go through your list of words and attach them to the appropriate category.  Words can be moved until everyone agrees with the category it ends up in. A category can have any number of words under it (even just one). Continue until the group is pleased with the categories that result from this activity (give sufficient time for this to happen). You can use appropriate graphics to enhance your diagram.  Consider using the linking tool to connect one word under two headings.

From here we will join together as a class and each group will hook their laptop up to the LCD projector to share their Affinity Diagram.

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