This year my curriculum unit will highlight the heroic accomplishments of two great Americans—that of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman as they led their peoples out of a land of injustice and inequality to a land of hope and opportunity. This project will focus on the lives of these two central characters as they are depicted in the masterful paintings of Jacob Lawrence, a man who was able to vividly illustrate the horrors of growing up Black in a racially divided South. He was able to celebrate African-American history, its significant figures, and their exploits through the usage of historical narrative. It is through these personal journeys to freedom that my students will be better able to understand the tragedies of slavery that many of their own ancestors endured.
At Roberto Clemente Middle School, our literature based reading program will lend itself nicely to an interdisciplinary approach to learning which will become the basis for this curriculum unit. We will have selected reading from Douglass’s autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, and the biography Harriet Tubman: The Moses of Her People. We will develop writing assignments related to these materials in the form of chapter summaries, character descriptions, and perhaps a book report. Certainly group discussions will become most interesting as we analyze what Douglass is relating to us on the surface but more so as we begin to explore with analytical and critical thinking skills as well as inferred meanings. Additionally, we will integrate our unit with the Clemente Art Department. We hope to have some of our young talented artists attempt to reproduce some of Jacob Lawrence’s paintings. We will also secure slides from Mr. Lawrence’s national traveling exhibition to serve as a pictorial narrative guide for our project.