Interdisciplinary Approaches to Consumer Culture

Objectives

This unit has a variety of objectives it will be adhering to: the Illinois State Board of Education English Standards, the College Readiness Standards, and Common Core State Standards (CCSS). As of the Spring of 2012 the Common Core State Standards have been adopted in 46 states. Simply stated, the Common Core integrates the skills students must demonstrate in order to be college and career-ready. ⁶

Currently, there are two federally funded consortiums, the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) ⁷ and the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium. ⁸ Illinois has adopted the PARCC framework to use as a foundation to measure student achievement.

Since the adoption of the PARCC framework, Chicago Public Schools have created a document called The Literacy Content Framework (Version 1.0). ⁹ Within that framework is the Literacy Planning Guide. The Literacy Planning Guide requires that all high school units (10 weeks long) should include: the reading of 3-5 short texts, the reading of 1-2 extended texts (at least 2 informational texts & 2 literature texts a year), a daily routine writing, 4-6 analyses per quarter, the writing of 1 research paper per quarter, the writing of 2 narratives a year, and a variety of assessment (baseline and quarterly assessments).

There are four main strands to CCSS for English, but Chicago Public Schools has only implemented two of the four: Reading Literature/Informational Texts and Writing. ¹⁰ The Common Core State Standards I have selected for this unit are:

1. Reading Standards for Literature 11-12.1 — Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where the text leaves matters uncertain.

2. Writing 11-12.1 — Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence. ^{11, 12}

These skills will be addressed in a writing exercise where students will use their newly acquired analytical tools to perform an Performance Assessment based on the following 2011 AP English Literature and Composition Free Response question (Form B): In The Writing of Fiction (1925), novelist Edith Wharton states the following, "at every stage in the progress of his tale the novelist must rely on what may be called the illuminating incident to reveal and emphasize the inner meaning of each situation. Illuminating incidents are the magic casements of fiction, its vistas on infinity." Choosing one of the short stories we have studied, write a well-organized essay in which you describe an "illuminating" episode or moment and explain how it function as a "casement," a window that opens onto the meaning of the work as a whole. Although students would normally choose from a list of suggested novels, I would instead challenge students to look at these illuminating episodes as a reflection of mainstream ideological values.

Literacy Shifts

This unit will contain three main literacy shifts:

1. Students will institute regular practice with complex text and its academic vocabulary (tier I, tier II, and tier III)

2. Students will build knowledge through content-rich nonfiction and informational text

3. Students will have their readings and writing grounded in evidence from the text

In literacy shift one, it is expected that students will institute regular practice with complex text and its academic vocabulary (tier I, tier II, and tier III). Using the works (music videos) of Katy Perry, Eminem, Coldplay, or Beyoncé won't generally meet the standard definition of a complex text. For example, Perry's "Teenage Dream" measures at about a 2-4 grade reading level. But clearly, this text is much deeper than what a 7 or 10-year old would read on a surface level. The multidimensional measure is much greater. In each instance, a teacher will have to assess will the qualitative measures of a text (meaning, knowledge demands, language features, etc.) along with doing some reader and task analysis (complexity of content, cognitive capacity, prior knowledge, etc.) to developing well-thought out text based questions.

Literacy shift two focuses on students building knowledge through content-rich nonfiction and informational text. Students, even in a high school literature class, need more access to non-fiction. AP English Literature doesn't depend on the use of non-fiction texts, but in reality, most of what my students will use in career readiness skills are viable through non-fiction texts. These texts will also help students develop ideas about literature through the citation of strong textual evidence as provided in both fiction and nonfiction pieces.

Literacy shift three has students grounding their reading and writing in evidence from text. Since students are using direct parts of an assigned text to support one another, the unit allows the practice of this skill. This will also allow me to help them incorporate texts into an argument. I'm hoping that these "illuminating incidents" they choose to write about will be further illuminated by the rhetorical, narrative, metaphorical, thematic features we identify through our discussions.