I want to start my curriculum unit with a specific essential question which will lead all our discussion, analysis, and various interpretations of the texts we study.
"How do I fit in?"
Since I want to prepare a unit that can be taught at different levels, the unit contains the reading of various texts, fictional, informative, and visual like movies or paintings. The novel,
Under the Feet of Jesus
by Helena Maria Viramontes, is one of the unit components and is the main text for my Advanced Placement students. The students who attend our regular English class -- in my district it is called College English -- may read the entire novel or few selected passages according to their capabilities. All students will be exposed to newspaper articles, essays, poems, and visual texts. Except for the novel and some texts I will select and bring to class, I also want my students to be actively engaged researching visual and non-visual texts.
The objective of my unit is to enhance my students' skills to infer, close-read, analyze, discuss, synthesize, evaluate, and connect the text to life. With this goal in mind, the unit is divided in three parts: the reading of the texts, fictional, visual, and non-fictional, the research of other sources connected to the unit theme, and the final assessment. Since the unit addresses a differentiated population, I have different activities and/or reading materials for each group of learners.