This unit addresses two English ten classes and three AP English Literature classes in the New Haven Public District. All lessons in these two groups of students aim to understand, interpret, analyze, and evaluate written texts. The District curriculum requires the application of the above mentioned skills to a variety of texts which include written texts – fictional and informative -- visual texts, films, paintings, and commercials without excluding oral texts. The students’ approach to the interpretation of the text is quite superficial because they are not used to spending time either reading and reflecting, or looking at the many different details the text presents. The same applies when they are asked to listen to someone’s story. They accept and believe anything internet and media say without reflecting and deciding independently, or they dismiss whatever they read or listen as meaningless. This particular group of students needs to understand what the written, oral, or visual message really conveys, its purpose, and the specific audience it addresses.
The school these students attend is an art school whose mission is to cultivate different artistic talents while maintaining a high level of rigor in the academics. The arts encourage and motivate everyone and help grasp 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, 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 does not include it. The College students (according to the New Haven Public District the term College students refers to a basic course of English) 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 (the teacher shows them how to write or what strategy they need to follow for reading and understanding), we do (the teacher and the students repeat the same writing or reading together so it becomes more familiar), and they do (the students have learned and can write or read proficiently) -- in combination with continuous references to the visual arts.