School and Classroom Background
This unit will be taught to 9 th graders at the Air Force Academy High School in Chicago, Illinois. The school is a selective enrollment military academy located on the near south side of Chicago, in-between the historically African American neighborhood of Bronzeville and the increasingly diverse neighborhood of Bridgeport. While the majority of students come from the surrounding neighborhoods, the school is open to students who are accepted from across the city. As in most Chicago Public Schools most students come from low income families with around 85% of the students receiving free or reduced lunch. While the school outperforms the district average on standardized tests and is recognized as a good environment, it lags behind the state average.
The Air Force Academy High School was created three years ago and in 2013 will graduate its first class of students. The school moved to its permanent location only two years ago. While the original class was half African American and half Hispanic, the new location has greatly shifted the student population. There are now a considerable group of first generation Chinese American students and a considerable Caucasian population.
This unit will be taught in a World Studies classroom and follow a unit on the history of Latin America and migration. The unit could also be implemented into a Spanish for Heritage Speakers curriculum using the Spanish language version of the book. For some fluent Spanish speaking students in my classroom who already excel at reading in English, I will have Spanish language copies of the book. With a greater push for literacy across my school, this is the first time reading a book and fiction text will be included in a Social Studies classroom. There is a wide spectrum of readers in the classroom, ranging from students reading at the 6 th grade level to students beyond the 9 th grade level. The average reading level of my students is around 7 th to 8 th grade, which matches up with how The House on Mango Street is written. If the calendar allows, this unit would be appropriate for the month of March for women's history month.
I have the unique luxury of teaching in the same city that the book is placed in. Many of the students live in the same neighborhoods described in the book and still face the same struggles that Cisneros describes. Having this direct connection to my classroom was part of the reason I decided to write this unit.
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