This curriculum unit, “Daughters Come of Age in Women’s Fiction,” has several objectives. The main objective is to improve students’ ability to respond to, reflect on, and make connections between literature and their own lives. Using fiction written by women, students will explore the character development of daughters who are depicted in the literature. In addition, they will explore ways in which these daughters discover and claim their own identities, in some cases losing innocence, in other cases rebelling, and in other cases emulating their mothers. Fiction written by women will be the lens through which students will explore the roles of these daughters in their families. All of these issues will be focal points for students to examine their own experiences, as daughters or as sons, in the process of coming of age and in the roles they assume in their own families. Film, music, and art projects will be used to enhance the literature, offering opportunities to learn through several modalities. Learning will be demonstrated not only through written work, but through art and oral presentations made to the class. Finally, the writing process will be integrated throughout the curriculum to develop students’ ability to organize, plan, edit, and revise their written work, with specific emphasis placed on the development of several five-paragraph essays.
The curriculum is designed for use with high school students who have little or no success in earning credits at our “parent school,” a large, comprehensive, urban high school. The students have traditionally had attendance problems and low academic performance. In general, they are not skillful readers, and their writing skills are largely underdeveloped. These students are referred to the alternative program at Wilbur Cross Annex, where I teach, to give them a second chance in a smaller environment, where team-teaching and collaboration among academic disciplines are an integral part of the program’s philosophy and its success.
At Wilbur Cross Annex, at least fifty percent of the day is spent in team-taught classrooms. For the most part these classes are interdisciplinary, but it is also possible to collaborate and team teach within one’s own discipline. This unit may be taught with a teacher of another discipline or it may be taught in conjunction with the unit, “Mothers Represented in Short Stories by Women,” by Sandra Friday.
The fiction in this unit is multi-cultural, to expose students to cultures like and unlike their own. Approximately seventy-five percent of our student population is African American and Hispanic; a small percentage of the population is Asian. The unit will, therefore, include literature by Asian, African American, and Hispanic women writers. The issues they write about, aspects of which may pertain specifically to their own cultures, are also universal. Daughters across cultures assume or are given roles in their families. Coming of age and the passage from childhood may involve different customs and rituals, but the experience itself is universal. As students have the opportunity for exposure to other cultures through the literature, they will explore the cultural differences and similarities
