Matthew S. Monahan
1.1 Descriptive Overview
This unit is primarily intended for use in the eleven-twelve ELA (English Language Arts) band. The duration is six to eight weeks.Students completing this unit will provide an objective summary of
Drown
by Junot Diaz wherein they analyze how different characters attempt to escape the worlds they come from and shape their identities through experiences and opportunities (Common Core State Standard Reading Literature 11-12.2).
Through reading, discussing, and writing about the short stories "In the Land of the Free" and "The Whipping" (also "The German Refugee" for either more advanced students or students seeking honors credit) students will demonstrate knowledge of nineteenth and early twentieth works of American literature, including how two or more works from roughly the same period treat similar themes and topics (CCSS RL 11-12.9).
Students will also read and analyze a wide variety of informational texts with the aim of delineating and evaluating reasoning in US immigration policies and trends. This will include the application of constitutional principles and legal reasoning especially as they relate to the premises and purposes of, as well as arguments employed by works of public advocacy (CCSS Reading Informational Texts 11-12.8).
Before students tackle texts literary or informational, pre-assessment strategies include evaluating level of mastery especially with regard to content specific vocabulary, US history, and student assumptions surrounding disparate immigration narratives. Shared student writings and a variety of discussions demonstrate and increase background knowledge.
In small groups students work cooperatively to find or create artifacts, primary and secondary sources are permissible, that establish an interactive timeline. Important dates include but are not necessarily limited to:
1790 (residency requirement for naturalization established; the 'Good Moral Character' requirement introduced)
1808 (Congressional ban on the importation of slaves)
1819 (Congress establishes reporting on immigration)
1848 (Mexican-American War ends resulting in acquisition of new territory and people under its jurisdiction)
1849 (California Gold Rush)
1857 (Dred Scott decision)
1860
1868 (14
th
Amendment)
1882, 1896 (Plessy versus Ferguson)
1898 (Spanish American War)
1924 (Immigration Act and Executive Order granting citizenship to Native Americans)
1929 (yearly immigration quotas made permanent)
1943 (Magnuson Act)
1954 (Brown versus Board of Education Topeka, Kansas)
1959 (Cuban revolution)
1966
1986
2013 to present (Immigration Reform, the Dream Act, etc.)
Through the continued development of their timelines students establish how immigration laws and policies, as well as patterns of immigration, have changed over time. Timeline exercises relate to the fiction pieces they are reading in the unit both explicitly and implicitly.
1.2 Statement of Context
I began teaching nine years ago at the Choir Academy of Harlem. There I was introduced to the works of the playwright August Wilson, specifically the two Pulitzer prize-winning dramas from his Century Cycle,
Fences
(1983) and
The Piano Lesson
(1990). Wilson's works paint a portrait of the African American experience across the twentieth century, obviously the Great Migration factors heavily into the lattice of his narratives.
After a year in Harlem I relocated moving further north, if only the ninety miles from New York City to New Haven. I taught at the Wilbur Cross High School Annex, a credit retrieval program that primarily served African American students and New Haven's rapidly growing Latino population. Despite my having an increase in the number of students from Spanish speaking cultures, I continued to hone my pre-dominantly Afro-centric curriculum. In addition to reading the works of Wilson, my students read Chinua Achebe's modernist masterwork
Things Fall Apart
and Toni Morrison's
The Bluest Eye
.
I now teach at Metropolitan Business Academy an inter-district magnet high school. We having an increasingly diverse population, according to the most recent reports we have a total student population of 376 students, while we are still predominantly Black and Hispanic, we have a growing number of White and Asian students. Bearing this in mind, coupled with students current studies in eleventh grade which include the
Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass, An American Slave
, the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, and director Spike Lee's
Do the Right Thing
, there is an increasing need for greater diversity and a wider variety of voices and experiences.
This unit not only strives to provide equal attention to an increasingly diverse number of groups and their voices but also to increase student awareness of the historical context that influences and shapes literature over time. It is my attempt at broadening curricular diversity and finding new ways of bringing both primary and secondary informational texts and sources into the English classroom to deepen student understanding of literature and the world.
1.3 Migration from CAPT (Connecticut Academic Performance Test) to Smarter Balance and the Common Core
Teaching in a time of transition such as this is not unlike the immigrant experience, with the coming of the Common Core, we are all strangers in a strange land. One of my aims in developing this unit is to overcome any sense of dislocation and disorientation and assimilate into this new cultural landscape of teaching and learning.
The current and soon to be phased out New Haven Public Schools English Language Arts curriculum for grades eleven and twelve revolves around a number of "significant tasks"; for grade twelve, that to which I am primarily assigned, these are as follows: personal statement/college essay, a poetry project, a literary analysis, and a "showcase portfolio." One thing that will undoubtedly remain the same, at least for the next two years, is the focus on literary analysis in quarters three and four. Supporting the notion that literary analysis is here to stay in twelfth grade English is the Common Core Connecticut State Standards for Reading focus on students abilities to analyze theme(s) implicit and explicit across a variety of texts.
Although the necessity of teaching students how to analyze literature remains, it will not be with the singular purpose of creating experts in the field, but will rather have the broader goal of helping students produce written arguments that either pose solutions to or simply increase their understandings of provocative issues of social significance. Regardless of preconceived notions and opinions students have regarding the complex issues of immigration, migration, and urbanization, their ideas will develop through their study and interactions with both informational and literary works, fiction and nonfiction.