I have worked as a seventh and eighth grade language arts teacher in a magnet school that services kids from pre-kindergarten until grade eight. It is my honor to graduate my students from their initial stage of their educational journey to the next stage, high school, acting as the wise sage in their story. Many of my students have spent their entire learning experience in this single location, their normal world. They are about to depart from a place they have called home and started a new quest of knowledge into an unknown world. I consider myself lucky to bear witness to this.
One benefit of my building is I know who my students are next year in advance. At my school, we have a large, and growing, number of multilingual students who are coming from all over the world with varying levels of English proficiency. It is important that I am able to incorporate all my students into the classroom despite their comprehension of the English language. For this reason, I am excited to develop this unit on mythology.
Mythology is a topic that interests students of all ages and cultures because mythology is a component of nearly every culture throughout the world. In those mythologies, there are certain levels of overlap and certain areas that are universal despite the arrival of said cultures. Because of this, mythology is something that unites us all and it is something I want to use to unite my students.
A significant component of this unit will be examining the impact one’s story has on their view of the world. In examining the work of critical theorists in the field of myth, students will be asked to look at what impact the theorists’ life experiences had on the work they did. As a result, it is my desire to see my students to consider their own metacognitive thought process when they develop a definition for mythology.
An important undercurrent to this unit is to bridge the gap between students and writers. In education, we are often training students to recognize strong writing and to examine their own writing for strengths and areas of improvement. Something that seems to be glossed over is the connection between these two acts: we are studying writers because we are writers. The texts we read in class should all be treated like model texts because we should be emulating the work of writers we respect and adapting it to meet our own writing style.
Something of note, in writing the lessons for this unit, I am utilizing group work. One of the reasons for this is that it is at the heart of the unit’s objectives: working towards a more groupist view of education. In my class, students’ desks are grouped together naturally. I am not making new groupings for each lesson, but, rather, engaging in the writing community that has developed due to the nature of grouping. This is incredibly important because of students written and oral language capabilities. Working in groups allows them to express ideas orally and/or in their native language keeping everyone a part of the conversation.
Additionally, I would suggest to anyone that uses this unit to consider wisely the population in their classroom especially if you are short on time and cannot provide a broad overview of multiple cultures that we strive to in the classroom.
