American Voices: Listening to Fiction, Poetry, and Prose

Rationale

This unit is developed to enhance and support the mandatory implementation of African-American History and Literature in the School District of Philadelphia. It can be used across the curriculum if used in segments giving students access to the effects of voice and sound historically and the present day. Messages are expressed through voice and physical body language. Many speeches have had a significant impact on Americans, and voice continues to affect the nation; students can experience this while paying attention to the current Presidential election candidates during the nominees' spoken performances.

All Philadelphia students can be taught to familiarize themselves with some of the important differences in African historically noted oral learning styles. Voice explodes through its attention to detail, rising, falling, trembling, reaching, and spinning. Silence itself brings to life some truths from the speakers' and listeners' experiences. Students will learn and become familiar with the practice of the human voice, which is carefully honed and sculpted; and non-human voice, which is digitized and used as an icon for the vast spectrum of sound. This unit will delve into the methodology and aesthetic play of structuring an oral performance piece; ultimately students will produce an entire spoken word program.

In order for students to understand African-American and Caribbean "voice" as a component of culture, tradition, and meaning in day-to-day living, students will gain knowledge of the tradition of orality in Africa, and what occurred a long time ago when Africans were brought to the Americas and the islands surrounding the mainland. Language learning is complicated. Unfamiliarity and, sometimes, disdain for the subject matter, the fundamental tool through which the majority of us learn is lost to a large population of African American children. ¹ Students will have a way to find their voice using memory and reconstruction of knowledge from a deeply embedded conceptual framework of their cultures. Students will be asked to find significance in oral history performance. We will use the speeches of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X to note this phenomenon. The poetry of Amiri Baraka will be viewed, read, and analyzed for oral history significance too. Oral history performance is particularly appropriate in giving social, political, and moral instruction, obvious or concealed.

Students will begin to develop their own imagining ear ² as a way in which to infer meaning and definition in written performance pieces as well as in critically hearing speeches and deciphering poetic dialogue. Spoken language variation and the study of dialect will give students background information in discovering the links to themselves and their ancestry through literary methods from authors they will read and in their own use of spoken word performance projects.

Students will experience how prominent African-American leaders establish themselves through their skillful practice of spoken words. We will analyze the speeches of the men mention above and include the late U.S. Senator Barbara C. Jordan. Vocal performance in this unit refers to a broad spectrum of cultural acts—from religious ritual, to spoken word events, to church ministers' preaching, and African-American political speaking. These cultural performance acts are all, at root, a defined series of symbolic gestures, done in a set manner always with some variations, having set meanings, and performed with a particular end in mind. ³ Students will hear actual vocal performances from digitized media - Internet, iPods, and recordings digitally documented, taped or recorded and stamped on vinyl. Naturally, these same acts occur in Caribbean and African-American communities and groups. Therefore we will cover this happening in both communities.

Voice in Caribbean countries has brought forth many poets and song masters. The same cultural roots are intertwined with that of the African-American. Research shows that because of the separation and dispersion of African families held in captivity, traditions remained in the spirit of the elders. Elder members of families still carried within their souls some of the traditions of their homelands. Certain practices from the African tradition never died as captors were led to believe. This spiritual linkage to the folklore of the Motherland is represented in past and present vocal traditions of the Caribbean poet and storyteller singers. Students will become attuned to comparing and contrasting vocal performance styles, rhythms, and verbal repetition, and accustomed to recognizing call and response practices. Students will learn to hear the power in the lyrics and the rhythms and the relations between them. Through this type of examination, students will learn where power is held in either the words or the rhythms. Dialectic voice will be learned as not a "put down" characteristic but as an aesthetic language transformation reflecting the speaker's ancestors' geographical placement during the Atlantic Slave Trade.