Medea E. Lamberti-Sanchez
More than ten years have gone by since Disney released the film and re-released it into a Broadway Musical in New York's most popular theatres. According to the New York Public Library's blog on the musical, "The popularity of the Disney Broadway show based on the Disney film has led many of our younger patrons to ask about the newsboys and the strike they led in 1899 on which the film and play are based." Younger audiences want to know why these boys and girls fought so hard to make a difference. If they are asking, then they should know. The question is: what literature will they use to build their prior knowledge? Will they read non-fiction books like
The Industrial Revolution
, or fiction books like
Joshua's Song
to seek out the information they want to know? Are some resources not specific enough because they want children to form their own perspectives on the topic?
My unit will focus on the relationship between fiction and non-fiction resources to identify how students can best get their information about a specific topic. For the unit's topic on child labor, I thought, for example, that students should read informational articles on child labor like
Life in the Dumps
, by Kris Saks, about a young girl who works for pennies sifting through a dumpster to help her family survive, and pair it with a fiction story,
Paperboy
, by Isabelle Holland, about a newsie boy struggling to support his family. The unit will use the informational, non-fiction readings to build knowledge, or lay the foundation for the historical event, and weave in fictional materials for the students to read for another purpose, that is, to generate their own ideas, connections, and supply the information that is missing. Perhaps, the information that the students get from reading a fiction piece will be different from the information derived from an informational piece. For example, if the students read The
Gate in the Wall
, a fiction book about an impoverished child in England, then they may make the assumption that working ten hours per day is a cruel, difficult life for a child their age. The students can connect to the age of the child and imagine themselves in that predicament. Fiction can provide the imagination part of the historical realism. In another words, the fiction will help create the mental images so that the students can imagine the historical event more vividly. Non-fiction pieces do not provide the same effect because they already provide the reader with everything he or she needs to know about the historical event.
For this unit, history and literature relate to one another, and both are interchangeable. The reader can learn a lot from reading literature about history and watching historical events. Literature provides the background knowledge of the event, so that any other information that is presented to them about the subject matter will help build a more comprehensible understanding. It is important to make sure that the students understand the conflict completely and then build in other resources to enrich the texts used to teach the concept. The unit will use a plethora of resources to promote critical thinking skills, while pushing the students to choose texts that are meaningful.