This unit addresses a very specific population composed by a good group of Advanced Placement students and another quite large group of juniors who attend a regular College class – according to our district the college class includes all those students who are struggling readers, or have low intrinsic motivation, and/or specific needs due to emotional and behavioral problems. Both populations are formed by students from different ethnicities, mostly African–American and Latinos with free or reduced lunch status.
Since my school is an art school, its mission is to cultivate different artistic talents while maintaining a high level of rigor in the academics. On one side, this aspect is an excellent tool I can use to encourage the interest of the strugglers or to introduce difficult topics or concepts. Each class is rich of individuals with a vivid creativity in many different fields and a great variety of learning styles. At the same time, my students often miss regular instructions in the academics because they are involved in numerous rehearsals throughout the school year.
This particular context opens up a variety of possibilities in the selection of teaching strategies and learning styles. To begin with, the AP students do not reflect the "traditional" population of students who enter the class with adequate skills and knowledge. These students have good writing skills but they have never been exposed to a rigorous curriculum covering a variety of texts from all literary genres like drama, fiction, poetry from the sixteenth century on. Their first hardship is reading and understanding canonical texts, not to mention poetry since our curriculum just brushes it. The College students struggle because they lack motivation and because of reading difficulties they proudly hide with the commonest excuse: this text is slow and boring. My students learn through continuous and differentiated modeling and scaffolding – a useful combination of I do (I show them how to write or what strategy they need to follow for reading and understanding), we do (we repeat the same writing or reading together so it becomes more familiar), and they do (they have learned and can write or read proficiently) –– in combination with continuous references to the visual arts.
