In this very particular environment, the unit starts with the following essential questions: “What is the world around me like? Why? What do I fear and want? What can I do to change myself and society?” It can be taught at different levels to reach all the different learners in grade ten classes and in the AP classes. It also includes differentiated strategies and/or lesson plans because the school has chosen to implement mastery learning (it means that students become responsible for their learning and once they master the level in which they are placed at the beginning of the year, they can pass to a more challenging one while sitting in the same class). This unit, then, contains different fictional, visual, and non-fictional texts to cover all the students’ needs (the photographs and/or any artifact from the Yale Art Gallery or at the Metropolitan Museum of New York are listed in this Overview and in the Teaching Plan).
1. Advanced Placement Students
The students in the Advanced Placement class read
The Red Convertible
by Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain/Ojibwe )
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and the play,
Sliver of a Full Moon,
by Mary Kathryn Nagle (Cherokee)
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. The focus is on the characters, the narrator, internal and external conflicts, setting, symbols, and themes. It also contains a series of different activities to teach how the author uses different literary techniques and literary devices to characterize and to convey thematic ideas. In the meantime, students are engaged in class-discussion and various writings: brief responses that help shape the class-discussions and formal analytical and argumentative essays. Before concluding this section, the students determine, discuss, and write about the themes of authority, power, isolation, and poverty related to the short story,
The Red Convertible
, and the play,
Sliver of a Full Moon
. While the students are reading and discussing the short story and the play, they also read some poems,
Repatriation Soliloquy
by Alice Azure (Mi’kmaq),
I Found Him on a Hill Top
by Ella Wilcox Sekatau (Narragansett),
Sad Country Songs
by John Christian Hopkins (Narragansett),
Homeland, Attic Dawn,
and
Pan’s Song
by Jayne Fawcett (Mohegan)
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and/or visual texts that focus on the same thematic ideas of the texts (the specific titles will be in the Lesson Plans Section).
2. Sophomore Students
This group of students reads
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian
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as main text. They also research lyrics and/or poems that reflect similar themes like authority, power, isolation, and poverty. They read an article from
The New York Times
“Games on a Reservation Go By” in a Blur by Michael Powell, the short story,
From Here to There,
by Elsie Charles Basque (Mi’kmaq), the poems,
Tarzan Brown
by John Christian Hopkins (Narragansett),
Progress
by Lindsay Marshall (Mi’kmaq), and
For the Children
by Ella Wilcox Sekatau (Narragnsett)
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. While they are reading the novel, they analyze the setting, characters, symbols, conflicts, and theme(s). They also learn how to close-read shorter passages focusing on how the literary devices used by the narrator characterize or convey meaning. Numerous in-class discussions follow with written reflections about concerns and/or questions that either the novel or the class discussions arise.
3. Advanced Placement Students and Sophomore Students
Both groups start the unit with a visit to the Yale Art Gallery to see and analyze some paintings or photographs of the North American Indians and/or any other artifacts the museum has. The students start an in-depth analysis of the Native American cultures through an anthropological research. They can use both the traditional research methods and social media to gather as much data as possible. The plan is to prepare a field trip to the two Native American museums in the state of Connecticut and possibly interview some people on what it means to live inside a reservation. As source materials, the student can also use photographs, videos they can shoot, as well as any other documents they can find. They will conclude this research with a short video in which they compare and contrast the cultural context of the text they read and today’s reality.
4. Summative Assessment - Advanced Placement Students
As final assessment, the students prepare a creative project portraying the community they have studied. They can choose the genre: a short story, a sonnet, a satirical piece, a one-act play or comedy, or a novella based on one of the unit themes. The specific prompt is in the Lesson Plans Section.
5. Summative assessment - Sophomore Students
This group of students, too, completes the unit with a creative project. They can choose to write: a speech (this satisfies our present curriculum but it also responds to the new standards) or a creative piece – a poem, a lyric, or a brief short story, and/or short film for the struggling students (those students who have any kind of special needs as indicated by Strassman in the article, “Differentiated Instruction in the English Classroom”).
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The specific prompt is in the Lesson Plans Section.