I work as part of middle school team in a magnet school in New Haven. As a middle school teacher, I have the same group of students two years in a row as they complete seventh and eighth grade. This unit is being developed for my future eighth grade students, who I am currently my seventh graders. Over the past year, my students have struggled to engage. They have been expected to cultivate their own work environments, learn multiple new schedules, and navigate an educational world that their teachers barely understand. In conjunction with this, they are witnessing the ongoing hate crimes going on against multiple communities of color. It is my hope that this unit will help to instill in them or reaffirm their sense of personal agency.
So much of my students’ world is visual. From memes to videos to selfies, my students are inundated with numerous images that they are both consciously, and unconsciously, interacting with. It is my purpose to give the students a stronger lens to analyze these images, to give them a road map to help them become critical consumers, and to produce their own images that will help them share their own messages.
It is important for my students to understand that there is more to art, film, and literature than what they are typically exposed to. Toni Cade Bambera speaks in her essay “Language and the Writer” about the presence of multiple literature and film canons. As the dominant intellectual elite continue to examine the canon, the steadfast determination to maintain the scope of dead white men at the center of the canon must continue to be deconstructed.2 In providing opportunities for students to view different texts, they are given a lens to examine through that they have not previously been provided. It my hope that throughout the unit, students will see that the world of art, film, and literature is something they have an inside look into rather than feel that it is a world that is completely foreign and alien to them.
In his article “The Problem of Online Film History,” Thulani Davis discusses the need for students, both black and white, to experience “black actors portraying black life dilemmas in which the stakes are high and every character has a compelling need to influence a decision to be taken about the future.” In speaking about this, Davis is reaffirming the need to establish writers like Lorraine Hansberry in the film cannon. “A Raisin in the Sun” is distinctly an African American story about a family’s choice that will have a huge impact on the outcome of their collective and individual destinies. It is also important to teach this film because so many times the tone of African American works are comical rather than dramatic. The need for balance is important in terms of creating empathy and a realistic depiction of the world. 3
Furthermore, when provided the opportunity, research shows that students are more responsive to learning about social movements when art, specifically photography is used.4 In teaching informational texts, it is helpful to use images to help activate learning in visual learners. This works to ground the text for the students. By activating the senses, student outcomes are enriched because they are using more of their brains to think critically about the material presented.
Students creating creative assignments in response to social justice movements gives the students the sense of being an active agent of change. By creating art, students are not only expressing themselves and their emotions, but also taking action to help drive change. 5
Furthermore, art has a way of leveling the playing field. Among my seventh graders, I also have a significant number of bilingual learners who come from many different parts of the world. With various levels of language acquisition, it can be a struggle for me to provide the necessary supports at their level for them to engage in my class. One thing I have found that my students have been successful with is practicing reading and writing skills in relation to visual texts. I have used short Pixar films to model reading skills as well as have the students demonstrate their understanding of the skill using material that equalizes the playing field in terms of the language. Most of the videos I have used have limited dialogue and the students are asked to interpret the actions of the characters and the pictorial representations that the artist provides to them. It is with this in mind that I developed my unit.