Strategies
The unit is designed to be broken down into four modules that can be taught individually, but most optimally as a collective semester long unit. The semester long unit is intended for students to develop a "relationship" with Biography over the course of a semester. The "relationship" is built around this idea of continually revisiting the topic of Biography so that it becomes the guiding principle over the course of the semester, rather than a lesson that is wedged between other lessons. Evident from exceptionally low test scores and basic reading ability that is far below high school grade level, a majority of students educated in poor urban schools, having been shuffled through a school district system, have never experienced such a depth of study.
The scaffolding approach to the Biography unit allows students to develop "critical literacy" skills so that may have the ability to "produce print, aural, and visual forms of communication." (5) Lev Vygotsky defined scaffolding (originating from his theory of the zone of proximal development (zpd)) instruction as the "role of teachers and others in supporting the learner's development and providing support structures to get to that next stage or level". (6) Therefore, the goal of the educator, when using the scaffolding teaching strategy, is for the student to become an independent and self-regulating learner and problem-solver. (7) In order to access prior knowledge about biography, biographies they might have been introduced to in the primary grades will be revisited in class. Based upon their memory and experience with these biographies, students will complete a rubric about what they remember about biographies and engage in a conversation about their rediscovery of Biography.
The core of the unit is broken down into four sections and based upon the acronym POW'D: Portfolio, Oral, Writing, Digital.
Writing
The first section of the unit establishes the biography "container." The "container's" purpose is two-fold:
- It establishes the definition of biography that will become the foundation of the unit. The definition lays the groundwork of form, which is essential. The form of biography gives students the tools to freely create their own biographies as the unit progresses.
- It establishes the profound significance of biography and the stories of lives students will read about and the stories of lives student will write about. When students are in the "container," they understand that a cauldron of (repressed) emotions may present themselves, and if they do, we have to honor that emotion. Students can begin to actualize the fluidness of being in and out of the "container." In some ways, this section of the unit is as much a study in the definition and form of biography as it is about developing an emotional intelligence as they listen to various life stories.
In the scope of the biography unit, Writing is analogous to the more traditional and organic ideas of literacy: students read, students write. There are two reasons to teach the Maus at this point in the unit. As a graphic novel, it implicitly accommodates the visual and spatial learner. As a biographical memoir, it allows students who have experienced a specific unrecognizable trauma to have some aesthetic distance by drawing them into a world which is entirely different but where the traumatic schema of thought is present. There are several components this section of the unit will focus on:
- Defining biography: examination of its meaning and form
- Reading/Critical Analysis: Maus by Art Spiegelman
- Use of literature circles as tool for student engagement and assessment
- Interviewing Skills: developing literacy skills in the interview process
- Writing/Editing: the formation of their written interview.
Oral
In this section of the Biography unit, ORAL interweaves the notion that students combine the knowledge of communities well beyond their homes (knowledge they are already receiving in History, World Cultures, and ELP courses) with knowledge of their rooted community. The ORAL gives students the opportunity to interview someone much older if possible, using the subject's life story as a window on the past. A major component of the teaching methodology of the oral interview as a form of biography is to engage students in the planning, conducting, and review of the interviews. This tends to be a successful strategy for those students with weak literacy skills because it builds upon the oral tradition of the student and their community. It also allows students who are struggling with reading and writing to approach literacy development laterally. The modalities of this section introduce the student to the importance of oral history as a necessary way to compensate for the digital age. Biographers in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries could rely on letters and diaries as forms of evidence. But today's world is characterized by the transitory records of texts, emails, and phone calls. Oral history is an important way of preserving the personal history of the late twentieth and twenty-first century. The following are modalities that will be explored in the unit:
- Web based models of oral biography: storycorp.org, tellingstories.org, doingoralhistory.org -Techniques on conducting the conversational style of interview.
- Tutorials on how to use the recording devices and the audio software.
- Editing the oral biography so that it distills a single emotion or thought.
Digital
The inclusion of Digital is intended to create a way for students to expand their understanding of biography, and accommodate a differentiated manner of learning. Students have the opportunity to contextualize the written and oral into a visual media piece that is driven by a multi-sensory experience. There is a potentially transcendent experience a student has by not only collecting images, letters, and sound from their interviewee but also by editing and arranging them into a biographical story that is both visual and aural. A student can understand the human complexity of crafting a biography: the life of their subject and the life in the context of culture and history. In the introduction to The Haunting Of Sylvia Plath, Jacqueline Rose considers Plath's complexity: "Plath is neither one identity, nor multiple identities simply dispersing themselves. She writes at the point of tension – pleasure/danger, your fault/my fault, high/low culture – without resolution or dissipation of what produces the clash between the two." (8) Rose personally acknowledged reading Plath as a "type of analyst of her critics and culture alike" and discloses how this journey "into" Plath "haunts" her. (9) Not that students will be haunted by their interviewee, but just as Rose exposed what was emotionally at stake in her biography of Plath, students should come away with some kind of emotional relationship with their subject.
Portfolio
Although the PORTFOLIO is the final module in which the publication and presentation of student work is examined, the portfolio culture develops at the inception of the unit. By the time a student gets to this stage, he is already beginning to work on habits of self-reflection. A student has the opportunity to present a draft of his interview, a recording of his oral history interview, and the digital film of his biography as evidence of his intellectual and artistic development. Interviewees, parents, teachers, administrators, and other community members will be invited to experience the completed biographies and participate in the assessment of the student learning. The idea is to honor the lives of those interviewed as well as commend the students for honoring those lives. Students will have the opportunity to answer questions about their experience and what they have learned about their interviewee, the history and culture of this person's life.
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