The Unit
The unit will take place over one quarter, specifically the third, though our journal writing will have begun at the first of the year. We will follow two tracks, one reading and one writing; the two will converge in the creation of the collection of vignettes towards the end of the quarter.
The unit also replaces a common Big Picture long-term assessment that is usually in the form of a lengthy autobiography (up to 75 pages). The purpose of this autobiography is to encourage introspection and self-awareness in the writer, as well as to instill a sense of accomplishment from completing such a hefty piece of writing. By the time students are nearing the end of the Big Picture education, they should have developed an understanding of how they've changed, how and what they have learned, and what they can do to control their futures. They should be able to articulate these things in their autobiographies. The assignment is not appropriate for my students, who sometimes don't remain with us all year and are intimidated by such an undertaking— a risk I cannot afford to take, as their relationship to school is already so tenuous. At-risk students tend to respond with more enthusiasm to smaller nuggets of acquired information, practice and assessment. I do, however, want to encourage students to explore who they are and the factors that have contributed to their perceptions of self. Hence, rather than a lengthy, sustained piece writing, we will accomplish some of the same goals with our collections of vignettes.
Text Selection
My text selection is partly influenced by readings and inspired discussion in my "Storytelling" seminar at the 2012 National Initiative, but also by recommendations by Diana Rogers-Adkinson and her team. 11 They give four key criteria for text selection for use in the reading instruction of delinquent youth. First, it should be culturally sensitive to and reflective of the students; second, the content should be meaningful to their environments and home lives; third, the content should be readily engaging; and fourth, texts should be inclusive and respectful, avoiding middle class success stories and representing instead the "limits of resources of students and families within the curriculum, varying models of family systems." 12 Selections are all vignettes or excerpts of memoirs.
The first selection is the essay "Salvation" by Langston Hughes. In it he relays a boyhood religious conflict that culminates in a painful family situation and long-term religious doubts. The family situation, language, and setting are familiar to many of my students. Richard Wright's autobiographical story/memoir Black Boy will be represented in excerpts, chosen for their representations of poverty and personal conflicts. I will present Chapter Six of Art Spiegelman's Maus: a Survivor's Tale, I: My Father Bleeds History as a vignette. Though an incomplete plot arc, it nevertheless is full of intense emotion. I anticipate that the genre of graphic novel will be appealing to students and may provide creative options for our final vignette collections. Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is another selection that is autobiographical in nature and full of young men's difficult choices, engaging stories, and vivid imagery. It is a collection of short fiction and vignette that meld to become a full length novel. I will use vignettes from the selection. In the past, I've had tremendous success with this text and at-risk students.
The central piece of literature for the unit, though, is The House on Mango Street, a collection of vignettes by Sandra Cisneros. It is especially rich in cultural imagery; also, vignettes, by their brevity, will be non-threatening to my students as they begin to create their own. The imagistic style of The House on Mango Street is suited for writings developed out of trauma writings, should some students feel comfortable to use them. Additionally, it represents our community's Hispanic population, which should be more present in our student body next year.
All of these selections are short or divisible to accommodate shorter attention spans that are inherent to most of my student population. The difficult conflicts and situations in each are well within the reality of my students. Through these works, students will also witness adverse situations that may be novel to them. This vicarious experience will expose them to how others cope with their traumas or perpetuate them in their own lives or by passing them on to the next generation.
Reading Strategies
We will study these texts for genre conventions, structure, the use of imagery, and style, as appropriate to the students on hand and anticipated outcome. Rogers-Adkinson's team specifically recommend guided oral reading strategies that emphasize repetition and a variety of commonly used comprehension enhancing activities. 13 Most passages we will read aloud using several strategies, including reading aloud in unison with a student partner or me, then reading alone. Other strategies will include close readings followed by a variety of formative assessments, such as discussion, graphic organizers, dialectical-styled responses, and emulative written responses.
Timeline
In the first half of the quarter, we will explore all works except for The House on Mango Street. That will take the last four weeks and will be our focus as students begin drafting their own vignettes.
After reading excerpts from Black Boy, we will do a Problematic Situations activity to encourage connections between life and text. We'll look at a problematic situation. For example: You have the opportunity to make the lives of yourself and your family significantly better, but to do so you must steal from your boss. He'll never notice, and you're feeling pressure from others, who say, "No one will notice—just do it." The response can be in the form of small group or large group discussion (i.e. fishbowl, or peer-graded). In similar formats or in cause-effect organizers we can also look at anti-social behaviors in the text—their sources and relationships to high drop-out rates in contemporary youth/schools. This may lead some of them to possible topics in their own lives.
In "Salvation" we'll look at emotion words and concrete language, perhaps in dialectical format. Emotion words would go in the left column and associated images and impressions would go on the right. As an analysis exercise, students will select key images, sentence, and phrases and then reduce the autobiographical essay into a vignette, more brief and concrete. In reverse, this could also be a pre-writing activity for an original work, with the list of emotions the student wants to include alongside their appropriate imagery and concrete language.
Again, in The Things They Carried, the students will look for language that is concrete and realistic. This time we will pay more attention to setting and the words that connect it to theme and specific emotions. We will work through our discoveries in class discussion.
Finally, we'll spend more considerable time with the text of The House on Mango Street. We will study the genre of vignette reinforced with other examples (as yet to be determined). MacCurdy suggests that anchoring emotions with place and things helps to isolate them; we can also look at writing samples for examples of this. This can be done with simple graphic organizers. Such connections could be cemented for the student with simple illustrations/images. Working towards Common Core objectives, they will also discuss (at least) and/or write (at best) efforts at analysis for author's purpose and effect.
Writing Strategies
Writing is the essence of this unit, and the primary method of cracking the trauma that hinders the quality of learning in my classroom. We will begin the year with a practice of regular journaling. At the beginning of the third quarter, we will begin our practice of healing writing as prescribed by Pennebaker, Alvarez, and MacCurdy. Eventually, we will start selecting pieces from these writings to become their individual selections of vignettes.
Timeline
From the beginning of the year, students will freewrite early in the day, every day, to clear their minds of whatever pollution they may be bringing with them to school. These will go into a secure location where no one will see, read, or critique them unless a student particularly asks otherwise. At the end of the second quarter or the beginning of the third (but not before I sense students are ready), I will prompt students to write about a traumatic event in their lives. We will do this for four consecutive days over the same event. Again, these will be secure and without critique. Three weeks into this practice, I will assign more specific prompts about events (now avoiding traumatic situations) about other events and influences in their lives. At approximately week five, we will select writings they want to further develop or alter into vignettes. They may go back and add new pieces about traumatic events they chose to freewrite about earlier in the quarter. We will devote the remaining weeks to drafting, revising, sharing feedback, and editing for production.
Journaling
Unless I assign a journal prompt in response to a specific issue, lesson, or other event, we will freewrite every day my students are in my room, at least three days a week—regularly and frequently. I define freewriting as uninterrupted, unedited, fairly non-stop writing. For first five, then ten, and later fifteen minutes, they will freewrite. Their writings will go into a lockbox or the shredder—their choice. The exception to this will be journals that they do want me to read, in which case, they'll make a note at the top and leave it in my desk. No one else will read these journals. The purpose here is to let the writer feel totally uninhibited, which will be necessary when we arrive at the third quarter. This is also good writing practice; our ideas are more fully developed when our brains are not distracted by word choices, spelling, phrasing, or other problems. It is okay to write, "I don't know what to write" until a new line of thought arrives.
At the beginning of the third quarter, we will begin our therapeutic writing practice. There are specific prescriptions for this. To receive therapeutic release, writers must address emotional topics, not innocuous ones. Teachers should not give feedback. Instead, students can put their writings into an inauspicious box or throw them away—this could be a symbolic exercise in itself. (We will have already established these policies by the third quarter.) Traumatic narratives should be retold in four sessions of 15-30 minutes each, either every day for three to five days, or once a week for four weeks (Pennebaker 164). Writing in present tense encourages immediacy in the writer's memory; it can be revised later if the writing is going to be used for another purpose . 14 While feedback is generally forbidden, it may be acceptable after later re-writings, with the permission of the writer. If and as trauma narratives are selected for revision, their release and use will be controlled by the writer.
Vignettes
A vignette is a short written sketch that highlights a person, object, setting, or situation, and often is not plot driven. All of the activities above will converge as students create their own writings in the learned style of memoir in the manner of vignette. If the writer desires, some may be based on trauma-inspired writings. As we near the completion of our reading selections, some writings will emulate reading selections, especially during the genre study of Mango Street. Other in-class prompts will be assigned with the intention of sharing with the group. The genre of vignette is appropriate for several reasons. First, writing for trauma victims is image-based, and vignette is an image-laden form. 15
When students have a selection of five-ten writings (from journals and other prompts and practice writings) that will become vignettes to work with, we'll replace our journaling and literary response activities with more structured, or deep, revision exercises. Selection of writings will be discretionary by the student; no one should be made uncomfortable by having selections—trauma-based or not—chosen for them. Peers and I may influence choices based on other qualities. As the group dynamic allows, we will spend time modeling and practicing carefully structured peer reviews with user-friendly rubrics designed for specific stages of revision. We will share final editing responsibilities, which may be reinforced by mini-lessons in punctuation or convention as needed. Our district print shop will "bind" their polished collections. In my experience with at-risk students, they are very motivated by the idea of a professional looking volume that they created. After seeing examples of previous similar projects, the reluctant learners in my book group at school last year wrote and revised gothic-inspired stories for weeks in anticipation of taking home their finished product after it had a color cover and professional publishing polish.
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