Introduction
Students today are living and learning in a complicated age when the insistence on human connection through digital media sets up barriers to human contact, and too often one's story is a Wikipedia chunk, someone's blog rant, or a Facebook tale. Concerns about the economy, the environment, and terrorism overwhelm students, and standardized testing affects their self-worth. All of these factors diminish the power of their own narratives.
This curriculum unit, Connecting to Community: Biography and the Digital Age is intended to use the storytelling structure of biography as a pathway for students to develop deeper relationships with each other, with a text, and with themselves. With an emphasis on biography as a story, the unit will primarily focus on three narrative implications of biography: the relationship to the reader, formation of identity, and the description of place.
By examining biography as a literary form, a "container," a student can feel safe to engage in a reciprocal and human relationship. So often a student who lives with the trauma associated of inner city poverty will stuff his stories where they never have to be told or he simply fabricates stories where there is little distinction between reality and fiction. Reading Art Spiegelman's Maus is one of the ways students will begin to have a deeper understanding of the effects of trauma because of the cultural distance the book offers. Art Spiegelman, the author, artist, and principle narrator, tells the biographical memoir of his parents who survived the Nazi Holocaust and internment at Auschwitz concentration camps. While the biography is presented in graphic novel form, the important feature is how it is based on (and dramatizes the process of) oral history because it is the story of Art listening and reacting to his father, Vladek. The biography also looks at trauma through a personal lense: Spiegelman contains the private pain of taking on his parent's trauma because it would never compare to the magnitude of his parents traumatic experience.
The literary understanding of biography will allow a student to tell another's story without this story being a direct reflection of his own life. The biography becomes as much about the life of the other person as it does about the validation of the authors life. A student learns a profound lesson of responsibility by becoming a "Biographer." When representing someone's story, in essence taking care of them, and there must be a responsibility to the facts of this person's life. The semester long curriculum is intended for high school students to have a firm definition of biography so that they may gradually develop a deeper sense of its form.
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