Activities
This section is divided up by activities for all essential questions and a sampling of activities for each essential question. Appendices are provided for most activities.
All Essential Questions:
Warm – Ups:
In order to give students a better context for the culture and era in which Mumbo Jumbo takes place, we will begin class with music, an image, or video, which students will analyze. In particular, we will use early jazz music from New Orleans and images from Congo Square, turn of the century New Orleans, and the Harlem Renaissance. For music and videos, YouTube has many great examples. The Library of Congress has a great selection of images and a simple online search can also uncover many images. I would also like to give the students a chance to physically warm-up on some days, practicing dances like the Charleston so that their bodies can get a feel for dance in the 1920's.This same activity can be applied to TURF dancing as well.
I will mix up the medium and strategy I use each day. On one day we may analyze an image of two dancers in Harlem and I may use the See, Think, Wonder strategy. On another day we may watch a video and use the making connections strategy. There is plenty of flexibility in these warm-ups and by changing the medium used daily, you can use the same set of strategies.
Venn Diagram: Jes Grew & TURF Dancing
This will be an assessment for me to determine student understanding of the relationship and differences between Jes Grew and TURF Dancing. This should be added to on-going as each essential question is explored. Ideally, students will change the color of pen or use a pencil to note when information has been added while studying different essential questions. This supports visual learners in seeing their progression of ideas.
Essential Question Assessments
After we study each essential question, students will have to write a short persuasive essay in which they answer the essential question. For at least the first two essential questions, this will be an in-class timed assessment. Students will always have the opportunity to improve their essays as we continue our study.
What influences help shape cultural attitudes and beliefs?
Warm – Up
I will provide students with an image, music, or dance video and ask them to respond to the questions, "Do you think this is an example of good (dancing, music, etc...), why or why not?" in discussion I will continue to ask students to justify their response in order to get to the idea of cultural attitudes and beliefs. This should be repeated over several days so that students have the opportunity to develop their responses in-depth.
I will also ask students to describe what they see in these texts to explore what attitudes and beliefs lay behind their descriptions. I will share my own writing to model what kind of writing I want students to do, particularly highlighting descriptive language and analysis. These warm-ups can develop into longer homework assignments in which students focus on their writing style.
I've provided a sample of my own writing here based on the TURF video "RIP Rich D" to serve as an example to other teachers and my students.
We are first introduced to a masked dancer in a bright red jacket, gray bandana over his face and a hood covering his head. He is confident and cocky, when he dances he uses his whole body, dipping and spinning around the edges of the city corner. The cement and light post are his props and his arms and hands perform a series of illusions meant to communicate the beginning of something important. Confidently, he steps outside of his street corner stage into the road. A typical Oakland 1980's tan sedan rolls by and blocks our view for a few seconds, functioning as a curtain for this street performance. When the car passes, the young man is striking a warriors pose; left leg bent slightly beyond a right angle with his hand on his knee, his right leg stretches behind him and his right arm stretches back into the air, it is as though he is flying with determination towards his goal, moving forward even in his stillness. What is he moving towards? Who is he? What is he so determined to do? Almost as quickly as he begins flying he is back on the corner, a potential victim in black enters the scene and soon we discover that the red jacket is death come again to a street corner in Oakland…
How has the African Diaspora Influenced America?
Graphic Organizer: Family Tree
This is a mini research project and assessment. As a class we will brainstorm influences or "family members" that have helped create TURF dancing. Some ideas may be so important that TURF dancing couldn't exist without them, like a parent, and other ideas may be more like a cousin, or indirectly related. Students may come up with ideas such as break dancing, street life, and the media. As a teacher I want them to dig even deeper, I may need to offer some suggestions as well. On the list I want to see some reference to African dance forms and process. At this point students will have done some reading on these ideas and will have watched a clip from RIZE so they shouldn't be to foreign however I may need to support students with these topic in finding appropriate reading material. After the class has come up with a decent list of "family members" they are ready to conduct research.
Depending upon the level of my students, we may do this as a whole class project with pairs researching one family member, more advanced students, can research an entire family tree independently. Regardless, for each "family member" one paragraph should summarize the topic while a second paragraph should discuss how the topic has influenced TURF dancing.
Graphic Organizer: Literal and Figurative Meanings of Mumbo Jumbo
In order to better comprehend Mumbo Jumbo students will need to understand the literal and figurative meanings of Jes Grew. Again, this can be a simple t-chart breaking down the literal and figurative meanings of the character, for which we can add. In order to further analyze the figurative meanings of Jes Grew we can deconstruct Reed's use of literary devices, metaphor and personification in particular, to make sense of Jes Grew and it's relevance to students. We can use two outlines, a circle for metaphor, and a dancing body for personification, as our outlines in which students write examples of how Reed uses metaphor and personification. These examples can be short statements or textual.
What does it mean to be resilient?
Graphic Organizer: How am I resilient?
Before students complete the graphic organizer I will give them a definition of the word resilient. Usually I have students first try and define a concept on their own but this will probably be a new word for all of them and so it may be more helpful to frontload the definition. Once students have read the definition, put it into their own words, and provided examples we will move on to the graphic organizer.
This will be a simple t-chart. On the left side it will say "times when I've been resilient" and on the other side it will say "times when I've struggled with resilience or haven't been resilient." Students will complete this and have the opportunity to share examples in a think-pair-share. It may be helpful to create a class chart that can be posted in the room as a reminder for students.
How does culture support the resilience of people and community?
Final Project
As previously mentioned, the final project for this unit will be a student created project in which they explore the final essential question, "How does culture support the resilience of people and community?" Although the content will be left for the students to choose, I will provide an outline and rubric for the class.
I will present the rubric first so that students have an idea of my expectations (see appendix B). Second, students will choose a cultural practice to explore and keep a journal in which they right reactions, experiences, etc…I will provide journal prompts for students and ideally, read and provide commentary when possibly. The last part of the project will be a presentation as determined by the class along with a narrative essay in which they write about their experience with this project.
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