Standards
The College Board provides a comprehensive list of standards that comprise an AP Literature and Composition course. Although this unit provides students opportunities to practice many of these standards, the unit emphasizes the following:
R2 The student understands a work’s thematic meaning and recognizes its complexity.
R5 The student makes careful details about textual detail, establishes connections among observations, and draws from those connections a series of inferences leading to an interpretive conclusion about a piece of writing’s meaning and value.
W6 The student engages in multiple opportunities to write and rewrite, producing writing that
A) is informal and exploratory, allowing students to discover what they think on the process of writing about their reading.
B) Involves research, perhaps negotiating differing critical perspectives.
C) Entails extended discourse in which students develop and argument or present and analysis at length.
D) Encourages students to write effectively under time constraints they encounter on essay exams in college courses in many disciplines.
Students will be using the lens of identity to investigate the way theme develops over the course of a novel. At the same time, students are asked to consult historical materials in order to place the novel in its political context. The activities described in the section titled teaching strategies demonstrate multiple ways these stands are approached. Additionally if the unit is taught outside of an AP course the instruction alights with Common Core State Standards for ELA. Specifically, the unit draws on CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.2 Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.