Voice Expression Activity II: Using Multimedia to Elicit Voice
In this activity students will listen to Langston Hughes read "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." I will be using an audio clip in which Langston Hughes introduces his poem and discusses its background. 20 This background knowledge will help the student understand the poet's motivation for writing the poem. After the student listens to the poem, I will ask her a series of questions, and we will discuss the poem in detail. I will place a copy of the poem on an overhead transparency so that the student can reference the poem as we discuss it. What is the poem talking about? Whose is the voice that is speaking? What and where are the Euphrates, the Congo, the Nile, the Mississippi? Who was Abraham Lincoln and why was he mentioned in this poem? Upon completion of our discussion, students will be given a blank piece of paper and asked to copy down the poem. Once they have copied it down they will be asked to draw a picture that symbolizes the meaning of the poem for them.
The next activity will expand upon the theme of rivers introduced by Langston Hughes. New Mexico's earliest peoples, the Anasazi and the Pueblo, settled along the Rio Puerco and the Rio Grande, the source of life for these cultures. The Rio Grande continued to play an important role as the Spanish Conquistadors followed it up from Mexico and began distributing land grants along its banks as the Spanish Crown claimed and settled the region. Today, the Rio Grande continues to be the source of life for New Mexicans and experiences drought and other acts of nature that also negatively impact agriculture, housing, and commerce. In order for my students to understand the importance and precarious nature of living along a river, I will show them a video I took after Hurricane Katrina struck the gulf coast and the levees broke in New Orleans. The lesson will emphasize that among the connections that exist between students in New Orleans and students in New Mexico is that neither community would exist without the river that gives and can also take away life.
I will begin the lesson by giving a brief overview of the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans and its people in August of 2005. After this introduction I will show students the video made while I visited the 9 th Ward six months after the levees broke. The homemade movie is accompanied by a song written by Nappy Roots. The purpose of showing this video is multi-faceted. First, the students at my school conducted a food and clothing drive to send to the victims of Hurricane Katrina immediately following the evacuation because they saw the devastation on the news, but they had not had any personal ties to the place; the video can help facilitate that connection for them. Secondly, I'd like them to explore voices that are not spoken but rather seen and experienced through other senses. Images, whether they be artistic renderings or photographs, house tremendous power. They can help increase people's compassion and empathy while at the same time heightening their awareness of social injustice. Lastly, this video is an expression of my voice, and although I do not speak during the video it is my voice that is speaking to the students from behind the camera lens.
The video provides images, like the pictures books I read to the students at the beginning of the unit, and will help them create words to describe what they see and feel. After showing the video to my students once, I will then show it a second time and ask the students to think about the houses that are shown throughout the video and the voices of the people that lived in these houses. After the second viewing of the video, we will begin a writing activity to express voice through poetry. Each student will write a poem using voices that they heard coming from the houses seen in the video. What would these voices be saying before the levees broke? What were the voices saying when the levees broke? What are they saying now? In this activity, I will talk about free verse and help the students distinguish between rhyming poetry, which they are very familiar with and free verse. Students will be encouraged to use free verse. The poem will be organized in three stanzas. The first stanza will focus on the voice of the past, the second stanza the voice of the present, and the third stanza the voice of the future. The goal will be to have each student write a poem that articulates a voice coming from a house in the 9th Ward, tracing its history from past to future. These poems will be put up on our bulletin board alongside still photos I have of the homes of the 9 th Ward.
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