The Big Easy: Literary New Orleans and Intangible Heritage

Unit Readings

Culture

This first section of the unit focuses on culture. Culture as defined by geographers is "a group of belief systems, norms, and values practiced by a people." ⁵ The content for this section defines the difference between folk culture and popular culture as well as identifies how culture diffuses or is appropriated and, often, commodified or destroyed through globalization.

The first interactive journal assignment (see strategies section for a detailed description of all strategies mentioned in this section) will create their own "Life Road Map" which asks students to map out the significant experiences of their life up to the present as well as their future hopes. By creating their map, we will discuss how our experiences have shaped the person we are today and what we believe about the world. Students will create a T-chart with identity terms (i.e. American, white, female, gay, etc) on the left side and what I believe based on this identity (i.e. democracy is the best form of government) on the right side. I will model this with my own life to help them understand.

The first reading for this section will be "The Bear that Wasn't" this excerpt comes from the text entitled Holocaust and Human Behaviorfrom the Facing History and Ourselves program. This story, told like a children's story, is about a bear who goes into hibernation, and while he sleeps, a factory is built around him. When he awakens he is confused, as are the factory workers who assume he is a factory worker and insist he get to work. The bear argues that he is a bear but no one throughout the bureaucratic chain will believe him.

"You can't be a Bear. Bears are only in a zoo or a circus. They're never inside a factory and that's where you are; inside a factory. So how can you be a Bear?" ⁶

Eventually, the bear gives in and becomes what everyone else believes he is and gets to work in the factory. When the factory closes, he once again feels the pull of his true nature and returns to hibernation. The message of the story is that identity is as much shaped by who we are as who others believe we are.

The second reading, entitled, "What tints your cultural lens on racial issues?"from the Christian Science Monitor, is meant to play off the first and introduce the idea of the "cultural lens." This reading defines the concept of the cultural lens and explains how it works on the subconscious level. It also defines the importance of understanding our lenses. According to the article, the danger of cultural lenses is that we believe we are seeing things clearly–we are seeing them as they are. Here a quote from the Talmud proves useful–"We see things not as they are but as we are." This is more than a question of how we see–it is really a question of who we are. The article ends with the line "It's the things we don't know about each other that hurt us." ⁷ Our ninth grade team is working on helping students understand main idea and supporting detail. I will use this article to practice that skill using a model created by the team.

To delve further into the idea of culture as a construct, we will look at a concept most students would believe is agreed upon throughout cultures: time. The first reading, "Living on Tokyo Time," is written by an American living in Japan trying to navigate the Japanese understanding of time as belonging to society. The author argues "the Japanese grow up with a sense of time as a communal resource." ⁸ The other reading is an excerpt from the essay "The Muse is always half-dressed in New Orleans" from Andrei Codrescu's New Orleans, Mon Amour where he describes a very different concept of time from the Japanese. "New Orleans time is approximate: No one gets to parties for at least one hour after the official hour....Everyone is extremely well-mannered, and manners take time." ⁹ Through this analysis of time, my goal is for students to understand how culture affects every aspect of life.

Moving from the seemingly simple idea of time to the more complex understanding of needs and wants. Here I will use the book Material Worldto help students get an understanding ofthe world's family. The interactive journal will ask students to name their most valued possession and explain the choice. My room is organized into tables with four students at each table. Each student will get one family's story and will have to complete a "like me/not like me" T-chart. Through this activity, students will see that, like time, what we value depends on when and where we live.

Religion

The second section of the identity unit focuses on religion. The purpose of this section is to provide an overview of religions in terms of their origin, sacred spaces and traditions, how they have diffused (or remained local) and led to conflicts in regions of overlap. Robert Stoddard and Carolyn Prorak define religion in their book Geography in America as "a system of beliefs and practices that attempts to order life in terms of culturally perceived ultimate priorities." ¹⁰ Because of the enormous role religion plays in the lives of many of my students, this is often tricky ground for a teacher. To represent religion as a cultural choice will cause many of my students to shut down. Yet, it is this response that I believe makes it even more necessary to find a way to get them to acknowledge that others are as dogmatic in their position and belief of rightness as they are and to posit the question: What happens when my truth is in conflict with another person's truth? How do we live together?

The first reading for this section, "The Effects of Religious Stereotyping" is from the Facing History and Ourselves text Holocaust and Human Behavior. Providing three examples of cultural lenses, this reading is a great introduction to the new section while also providing an opportunity for looping back to review the essential ideas of the unit.

Cultural lenses also play a significant role in political conflict. Students, in pairs, will next read two perspectives on the building of the Islamic cultural center (known by some as the "ground zero mosque") two blocks away from the 9/11 memorial. This provides another opportunity for close reading as students tease out the cultural assumptions made by each side in the debate. Additionally, through dialogue about the arguments on both sides, students are asked again to evaluate the origin of their beliefs.

Polygamy and sati, both practices that have been outlawed by their respective religions but continue still today will press students who were reluctant to take a stand on previous issues. When faced with cultural practices that directly conflict with our own morality, we must grapple with the tension between judgment and cultural relativism. Here our cultural lenses often provide the rhetorical argument for our position–If we feel it, it must be true. This section of the unit corresponds to the standards of research identified by the freshman team. Students will search for articles on both topics through the databases in the library. They will identify the origins of the practices and why they continue despite a shift in the laws. The interactive journal question will ask them to explain their thoughts and emotions about the practices.

Identity: Race, Ethnicity, Gender and Sexuality

Race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality encompass the final section of the identity unit. This section introduces students to the notion of cultural constructs of race and gender as well as the real impact of those constructs on groups within society. It also examines identity and space–how spaces are gendered or sexualized. For my students race and ethnicity is a significant part of their identity. The personal archeology for them to examine what they have learned about their own race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality and that of others. How would they define their own identity within these terms? What assumptions do they make of others?

The first reading, another from the excellent resource Holocaust and Human Behavior from the Facing History and Ourselves program, is entitled "Little Boxes" and tells the story of one person's struggle to identify herself by the limiting definitions of society. He begins the reading with the act of checking ethnicity boxes on a form but expands into identification as a whole. After a long internal search, he settles on the argument that it is the external that is limiting but if we can remove ourselves from those limitations, our power of self-creation and recreation is endless. It ends with seeing the struggle for identity as a source of strength. "I am not objective. I am subjective with more than one bias, so I can see both sides of an argument between a black militant and white conservative, a tenant and a landlord or a Protestant and a Catholic. I will usually side with the underdog, but it is necessary to understand opposing viewpoints in order to take a position." ¹¹

The second reading for this day, "Stereotyping" is from the same text and tells two stories of the power of ethnic identity. The first story is about a Native American who entered the Marines and lost his identity to the nicknames and stereotypes that the other men put on him. The second story is from the perspective of an Asian high school student who initially valued the positive stereotypes that he received but eventually those stereotypes proved hard to live up to. The messages of both readings call for a return to "The Bear That Wasn't" story to help the class understand that while society works to simplify and categorize, it is essential that we see others and see ourselves as the multi-layered beings that we are.

Another opportunity to examine lenses and reflect on the meaning of our own responses, arises through the use of two conflicting interpretations of the government response to Hurricane Katrina and her aftermath in New Orleans. Using an excerpt from Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke that argues the government response was slow and inadequate juxtaposed with a National Review article that praises the response by the federal government.

An excerpt from Dave Eggers' Zeitoun provides students with another opportunity for close reading of cultural lenses. Here the book's namesake has been arbitrarily arrested and taken to a makeshift jail at the Greyhound station. The cultural lenses of the guard is glaringly obvious as they fed them pork despite knowledge of their religion (Muslim) and when Zeitoun asked why they were there, the response from a guard was "You guys are al Qaeda." ¹² Not only does this offer an opportunity for close reading and conversation but it is also a place to reflect on our own experiences of being both the guard and the prisoner.

Finally, students will examine the presentation of gender and sexuality in magazine and television advertisements. Deconstructing the gendered arguments presented in ads and reflecting on their own response to these images. I have collected these advertisements over time for the Women's Studies course that I teach every other year. The ads vary in their complexity and will serve as a way for students to find images that challenge them.