Structure
As this is a unit designed for a resource classroom, there are several structural differences from a unit that would be designed for a regular education classroom. Resource class time is important in order to keep students abreast of the regular education curriculum. While there are core content objectives for the regular education disciplines, there are no set guidelines for the special education classroom. Instead, the focus of the resource classroom is to facilitate growth for the students in their areas of academic weakness. When longer writing assignments, exams, or projects are assigned in the regular education classroom, they are often scaffolded-broken down into shorter formative assignments to allow special education students to reach the same end point-in the resource room. The lessons of this unit will be designed to last only part of the Resource period daily, to allow support for the students’ other regular education coursework.
In addition, the resource time period is often used for auxiliary special education services, such as social work or speech therapy. Thus, it is important that this unit be flexible to the ever-changing needs of the students. In response to that, lessons will generally be completed within one period, rather than stretching over multiple days. Although the lessons will naturally build upon one another, the students will best be able to keep abreast of the content if each lesson is a discrete, self-contained entity. This is also important because Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School is an arts magnet school and students are frequently attending field trips or rehearsals for performances.
Most of my students work at a slower than average pace due to processing disorders and working memory issues. Because of this, the students are already struggling with the coursework from their regular education classes. This unit is designed to improve their critical thinking and analysis skills, but not to increase their workload significantly. As a result, students will not have any assignments to work on outside of the classroom. Students will be given short excerpts from books rather than being required to read the entire text, and all texts will be read aloud, with students having their own copies in order to track and annotate. The work within the classroom will be scaffolded individually for each student, but presented at an accessible instructional level.
Finally, this unit is designed to parallel a unit simultaneously occurring in the students’ English course. In the resource classroom, students will be writing in response to journal prompts, completing activities, and discussing. While there will be a final project in which students can present their learning, the culmination of their learning in this unit will truly be reflected in their final paper for the parallel English unit.
Adaptations for the Regular Classroom
Although this unit is designed to function in a special education setting, much of the material can be easily adapted for used in the regular education classroom. While the activities are designed to build upon each other sequentially, the lessons are also intended to be discrete entities and thus could and should be used in another unit or for a different student body. Suggestions for the regular education setting include: increased pace, more challenging texts, independent reading, and homework assignments.
Texts
The unit will support the regular education classroom reading of the novel
Monster
, by Walter Dean Myers.
Monster
is the story of a teenage boy from Harlem, Steve Harmon, who is on trial for participating in a fatal armed robbery of a convenience store. The novel addresses the story through Steve’s first-person diary intertwined with third-person script-like sections of the trial. The writing structure places the reader as a member of the jury, not entirely sure of the main character’s guilt or innocence. Throughout, the reader is presented with the court transcript of testimony, as well as the journal of the narrator, Steve. The reader must evaluate the information and come to an independent conclusion before the jury reveals their verdict.
Monster
is a book that is typically taught in high schools because the content, the struggles of a working-class, urban, black, male teenager trying to succeed, allows for text-to-self connections. Themes of coming-of-age, prejudice, and friendships, allow for use of the book in different units. Because of its high-interest content, seventh grade reading level, and large font size, this book is accessible to students with a wide range of abilities.
In addition to
Monster
, the unit will employ short excerpts from various texts. Short selections are chosen so that they can be read aloud and analyzed within a partial class period. Having shorter selections also allows for the use of increased variety of texts analyzed. Suggested texts are listed below and include samples from various genres, including high school classics such as
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
and
Catcher in the Rye
, and less traditional texts such as David Eggers’ fictionalized autobiography of a Lost Boy of Sudan,
What is the What
.
Activities
Throughout the unit, the first 10 minutes of class will be spent reading the novel
Monster
aloud. Although the novel is at a seventh grade reading level, making it more accessible, giving students repeated exposure to the content allows them to engage with the material on a deeper level. For those students with lower reading levels, it prepares them to participate in class discussions and assignments.
Two Truths and a Lie
In order to start the students thinking about evaluating another’s voice, the class will play the game, “Two Truths and a Lie.” This game is a classic icebreaker game that relies upon the audience’s ability to discern between fact and fiction. Each student will be required to create two personal truths and develop one lie. The goal of the activity is to determine which of the three statements is an untruth. Although the students know each other from school, they know very little about each other’s outside lives. This activity will serve the dual purpose of improving the group cohesion and trust, and stimulating them to start thinking about the qualities that make a statement believable.
Following the activity, students will be asked to write a journal prompt responding to and evaluating the activity. Students will have ten minutes to answer the following questions: What made you choose one statement as a lie over another? Was it easy/tricky to determine the truths among the three statements? Which statements were easy to pick out as lies and why? Was it difficult for you to lie convincingly? After the journal prompt, I will have students share their responses, leading to a general discussion of the characteristics of true and false statements. As a result of this activity, students will develop a series of questions they would ask themselves to evaluate the truthfulness of a statement. Some examples of possible questions developed include: Did the person seem sure when saying the statement? What is the purpose of saying this statement? Are you trying to trick your classmates? Does the statement seem plausible/realistic? Did the person include details? If students are unable to fully develop the questions after the first session of Two Truths and a Lie, we will play the game again. The questions the students develop will be the foundation for the application of evaluation skills to texts later in the unit. The guiding questions they develop will be posted onto the board and revised throughout the unit to reflect changing student discernment.
Dictionary Game
Another activity for early on in the unit, while students are still learning to evaluate the reliability of voice, is the game Dictionary. This game is commercially packaged as Balderdash, but can simply be played with a dictionary. The person whose turn it is selects a word from the dictionary. That person queries the group to determine whether anyone already knows the definition. If nobody is familiar with the word, each person is required to develop his or her own, false, definition. Those definitions as well as the correct definition are written down on slips of paper. The leader reads aloud all of the choices and the other participants must vote for the one they believe to be correct. A participant earns one point for selecting the correct definition and also earns one point for each person who chooses his or her definition as the correct one.
After each student has a chance to select the word from the dictionary, students will respond to the activity with the following journal prompt: Do you use the same rules/questions in the Dictionary Game as Two Truths and a Lie to determine true and false? Explain. The game, writing prompt, and discussion will increase students’ vocabularies and will expose them to the fact that different voices are reliable in different contexts. In order to write a convincing dictionary definition, one must write in the formal tone and with the structure typically employed in dictionary definitions. Without these critical characteristics, participants are unlikely to trust that definition. Structure, and its crucial role in establishing validity, is introduced through this activity. Later in the unit the importance of structure will be revisited when we address phishing, the e-mail scam. Following the writing prompt, the class will determine if the guiding questions need to be amended to fully address the issue of truth in the context of the Dictionary Game. Any changes or additions to the guiding questions will be posted on the board for student reference.
Text Analysis
After the introductory discussion and lead-in activities surrounding truthfulness, during which students develop their own guiding analysis questions, the unit will continue with a basic exploration of literary genres. Genre is a common topic for English or Language Arts curriculum, but is an important place to start in the analysis of the reliability of texts. Students will identify their preconceived notions of the truthfulness of each genre: non-fiction, fiction, biography, autobiography, tall-tale, etc., specifically focusing on the quality of the narrative voice. Students have previously learned about genre, but this review session will reengage them with the topic within a critical literacy context.
One of the most interesting books to talk about in this discussion is James Frey’s
A Million Little Pieces
. Chosen in 2003 as Amazon.com’s editor’s favorite book and then in September 2005 for Oprah Winfrey’s Book of the Month, this memoir of drug and alcohol addiction received rave reviews. Soon afterwards, Smoking Gun website produced an article criticizing the book for untrue embellishments (The Smoking Gun). One of the main critiques was that Frey spent only a few hours in jail, rather than 87 days, as the book claimed. What does it mean to include several “lies” within a greater work of “truth”? Is it still valuable as a work of fiction? Can the book still be considered a non-fiction piece? It is still considered as such by the New Haven Public Library. In the first few pages, Frey’s vivid language, replete with grisly details of his withdrawal from alcohol, make
A Million Little Pieces
a particularly powerful book to read aloud. After several pages, I will query the students for their first impressions of the book, as well as hypotheses of the genre. I will then provide the background information to the book, including accolades received, selections from The Smoking Gun article, and the specific inconsistencies with Frey’s life experiences. As a practice in analysis, students will evaluate the genre of Frey’s
A Million Little Pieces
, providing evidence to support the assertion.
Throughout the unit, students will be exposed to text samples from different literary genres. For each sample, a short selection will be read aloud and students will have their own copy of the text excerpt from which to follow along. After each reading, students will identify the genre of the text and write a paragraph evaluating the reliability of the voice. I will provide students with a graphic organizer to help them organize their concrete details and to support them in determining whether the text is or is not reliable (Appendix A).
The English department at Cooperative Arts and Humanities has been teaching the students the Schaeffer paragraph model of writing. This model embodies the following structure: topic sentence, concrete detail, commentary, commentary, concrete detail, commentary, commentary, and concluding sentence. Requiring students to provide evidence to support their answer is practice for a skill they must employ in all their academic writing, as well as on the standardized CAPT. As practice and as a method of developing their writing and critical literacy, students will write paragraphs evaluating the text using the Schaeffer paragraph model. The following topic sentence will be given, as well as a graphic organizer delineating all of the required components of a Schaeffer paragraph: “(Name of text) does/does not have a reliable voice.” At this point in the unit, students will begin to apply the guiding questions that they developed during the Dictionary Game and Two Truths and a Lie. For each text, they will ask themselves the guiding questions and provide evidence from the text selection to support their answers.
Examples of possible texts include:
-
· Mark Twain,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, page 1
-
In the first page of this novel, Huck introduces himself as the narrator. He says, “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth…” (Twain 1). This text would be an interesting beginning text for the students to start evaluating, because Huck outright admits that people lie.
-
· Walter Dean Myers,
Monster
, pages 137-148
-
This is the text the students will be reading for English class. In this selection, Steve reveals that he thinks his prosecutor and his mother believe him to be guilty. He also claims “ I didn’t kill Mr. Nesbitt” (Myers 140).
-
· Dave Eggers,
What is the What
, Title page and preface, pages 4 & 6
-
This text is a difficult one to interpret. On the title page, the book is identified as a novel and as an autobiography. During the preface, the subject of the autobiography, Valentino Achak Deng, writes “I told my story orally to the author. He then concocted this novel, approximating my own voice…because many of the passages are fictional, the result is called a novel” (Eggers 6). This text will be analyzed later in the unit. I will particularly focus upon the issue of personal truth vs. collective truth.
-
· J.D. Salinger,
Catcher in the Rye
-
Holden Caulfield is the quintessential unreliable narrator. His commentary is full of hyperbole and contradiction. Almost any page of this text would be appropriate.
-
· James Frey,
A Million Little Pieces
, pages 6-11
-
This novel/autobiography won acclaim from Oprah Winfrey, only to be discovered later as fraudulent. It is still filed under the non-fiction section at the New Haven Public Library. In this beginning section, the narrator describes his drug and alcohol abuse and his symptoms. “What time do you start drinking? When I wake up. She marks it down. How much per day? As much as I can” (Frey 9). Can you trust someone who has just admitted to drinking as much as they can? What qualities make someone untrustworthy?
-
· Encyclopedia article
-
· Any biography, preferably of a high-interest subject
-
· Autobiography, preferably of a high-interest subject
-
· Tall tale, or some other fable with outrageous claims
This activity can be repeated with numerous works of literature from all genres, increasing student exposure to different texts. As an adaptation, the title and cover of the book can be removed to eliminate the visual clues to genre.
Concurrent with this activity is a discussion of what we learn as readers, from a close reading of an excerpt. How do we know that a text is fiction or non-fiction? How does the narrative voice differ from non-fiction to fiction? What happens when these fiction/non-fiction lines are blurred, as they often are in books and online? What do we learn about the narrator? Using Bloom’s Taxonomy, these questions stimulate higher order thinking within the students. This discussion will be teacher-led, particularly in the analysis of the first few texts, but will subsequently become student-led as the students become defter at extracting supporting details from the text. Decreasing teacher guidance is an appropriate scaffold for students who are struggling with the activity or having difficulty finding concrete details within the text to support their claims.
In addition to the Schaeffer paragraphs, students will be asked to write journal responses following many class activities. Their journals are provided by the teacher every year and are a record of the work they complete in the class. They contain a vocabulary section and students regularly answer writing prompts in them throughout the year. The expectations for the journal prompt responses include a length of at least five sentences, complete sentences with capitalization and ending punctuation, and proper mechanics and punctuation. After writing each journal prompt, students will be asked to share their answers, but only to read exactly what they have written. There are two reasons for doing this. First, many of my students are successful at discussion, but have difficulty communicating their thoughts through writing, an essential skill for academic success. If students are required to read only what they have written, they will be encouraged to communicate their ideas through writing.
Secondly, the students have the habit of writing quickly without thought and not reviewing their own work. Reading written work aloud, it is easier to hear the awkward phrasing, the incorrect grammar, incomplete sentences, or missing words. The class has been working daily on oral language, grammar, and punctuation revisions to give them more practice editing. Sharing their work aloud and recognizing errors are steps towards students becoming comfortable engaging in the writing process of editing and revision.
Incorporated into the discussion of the narrative voice will be a discussion of perspective and voice in real-world situations. In addition to creating a curriculum unit that will engage students in thinking about literature, this unit will provide a broader context with which to discern fact from fiction and reliability. Many of my students seem to have limited exposure to and understanding of aspects of life out of their own realm. How can this be the when they live in such an interconnected global world of continuously streaming information? How do we know whether we can trust someone’s voice, whether it is a narrator, doctor, mechanic, or salesman? In order to complement the analysis of literary texts, the unit will also include real-world texts, such as advertisements and e-mails, which must be assessed for reliability on the practical day-to-day level.
In this vein students will explore advertisements, and fictional and non-fictional narratives online. Advertisements from newspapers and magazines, read critically, will reveal intentional deception. Real-estate advertisements should be dissected for the biased language. How can a decrepit shack be described as a “cozy, fixer-upper?” It is important for the students to be aware of the intention of these documents and to begin to see through the unreliable language.
Digital Natives
Technology allows for previously unimaginable connections between people around the world, or within the same classroom. At the same time, this influx of information barraging the students requires even more skills to discern fact from fiction. As Marc Prensky argues in his article, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” “as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today’s students
think and process information fundamentally differently
from their predecessors” (Prensky 1). Prensky believes that as teachers, we should adapt to this new “digital native” student and provide information in new media forms. Judith Elkin argues that electronic books and other new forms of literature should be incorporated into a modern idea of literacy (Elkin 157). In keeping with this idea, this unit will explore two main technological texts, Myspace and Wikipedia. While assessing the truth or reliability of voice, it would be incomplete not to address modern digital texts that the students are faced with everyday.
Myspace
This social-networking site developed in the late nineties and has exploded into the mainstream. There are currently over 110 million active monthly users (Stelter 1). It has become a portal to the web with Myspacetv.com, celebrity Myspace, and separate sections within the sites for comedians, filmmakers, and band members, all hoping to be discovered by a major label. For people under age 30, and certainly under age 20, having a Myspace page is commonplace. Over half of my students have their own Myspace websites and spend numerous hours each day on this site.
Culturally, it has become an interesting space. On the website, the lines are blurred between fact and fiction. Browsing through the websites it at times impossible to distinguish between true self-depictions and less authentic portrayals. The unique situation of Myspace, that it is at once privately anonymous and yet also extremely public, further obscures its reliability. The Terms and Conditions require that users be of at least 14 years of age and that registration information be truthful and accurate. Users may not misrepresent themselves as under age 18. Although there is a list of inappropriate content to post, “MySpace assumes no responsibility for monitoring the MySpace Services for inappropriate content or conduct” (www.myspace.com). Users are free to set up their own webpage, posting pictures, comments, and selecting their top eight friends. There are no requirements to be truthful. How then, do you know what to trust? What are the dangers intrinsic to this website?
If this website is blocked on the school server, I will use the “capture screen” option to create a PowerPoint slideshow of various Myspace webpages. Students will then make a list of what types of information people display on their webpages and compare and contrast that with their own webpages. Students will be asked to respond with a journal prompt: What information do you display on your webpage? What are some of the vulnerabilities? Do you tell the truth on your own Myspace/Facebook pages? When do you present yourself totally truthfully? When do you choose to embellish or withhold information? Do you consider this lying? I will ask students to explain the choices behind their Myspace webpages, particularly relating to this issue of authentic portrayal. The previously developed guiding questions will also be applied in the discussion of Myspace.
Wikipedia
At Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School, each senior must complete a research paper that incorporates his or her artistic major as part of graduation requirements. Students were outraged when they were told that Wikipedia had been banned from the list of acceptable sources. The English version of Wikipedia has over 2.3 million articles and there are ten language-specific different Wikipedia websites (www.wikipedia.org). Still, the students don’t understand that Wikipedia is an open-source reference tool. This unit will discuss basic principles of the website and how it functions. Using a digital projector, I will enter a Wikipedia article and change the information right in front of the students. Students will then respond to the following journal prompt: What are some of the advantages and dangers of Wikipedia? Can you trust information from the site? Is it more or less reliable than Encyclopedia Britannica?
Phishing
Phishing is a dangerous scam perpetrated through e-mail to retrieve personal information and financial data, such as credit card and bank account numbers. These scams have become so widespread that Microsoft even publishes a guide to recognizing these dangers (http://www.microsoft.com/protect/yourself/phishing/identify.mspx). Although many of my students do not even hold bank accounts yet, they would be very susceptible to these techniques in the future. Students will examine an example of phishing, analyzing the typical features that are associated with fraudulent inquiries, and the characteristics that convey reliability. A complete lesson plan involving phishing is included later in the unit.
StoryCorps
StoryCorps, founded by David Isay in 2003, is an effort to record people talking with someone important to them. As the website states, “By recording the stories of our lives with the people we care about, we experience our history, hopes, and humanity” (www.storycorps.net). Since 2003, over tens of thousands of people have recorded their conversations each day. These conversations are recorded onto CD as a permanent record from the participants and one conversation a week is compiled into a short segment and aired on National Public Radio. These produced conversations have been compiled onto a CD entitled, “Listening is an Act of Love.” As in Myspace, the semi-anonymous social-networking site, people participating in StoryCorps are not bound to tell the truth. I will play segments from “Listening is an Act of Love,” and students will evaluate these audio texts using the same graphic organizer and guiding questions used earlier in the unit. Even though the stories may seem outrageous, such as an old African-American woman recounting having her nail ripped off by a white man for having nail polish during the 1950s, they still ring true. Why? Is there something valuable in communicating an experience, even if it might contain factual inaccuracies? How do people who have endured the unbelievable communicate their stories?
Final Project
As the culmination of the mini-explorations into reliability and truthfulness in the narrator’s voice, as well as in real-world texts, students will be asked to create a final project. According to Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, students will have the flexibility to show their knowledge through a myriad of mediums (Gardner).
Students will be asked to work individually or in small groups to complete one in the following list of possible final projects:
-
1. Create a Wikipedia entry for Cooperative Arts and Humanities High School.
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2. Create a Myspace webpage for Steve Harmon, the main character from
Monster.
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3. Following the StoryCorps model, record an interview between two people, editing it so that it was an interesting/cohesive story. Students could also pretend to be Steve Harmon and another character in the interview.
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4. Write an online blog of Steve Harmon’s trial (at least 10 entries).
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5. Write a letter to the New Haven Public Library, explaining where they should catalog James Frey’s book,
A Million Little Pieces
. Provide reasons and details.
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6. Write a letter to the principal convincing her to allow students to use Wikipedia as a source for their senior research projects.
-
7. Create an advertisement for a junky product or a run-down building that makes the item sound wonderful.
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8. Produce a brochure warning about phishing to distribute to the Cooperative Arts and Humanities community.
