Rationale/Overview
Generally, the President is taught and discussed within the confines of a United States History or Civics classroom. This unit seeks to expand the possibility of discussion to students in an Honors Literature/English Language Arts classroom.
Five texts will be used within this unit: The Autobiography of Abraham Lincoln, Bill Clinton's My Life, Barak Obama's Dreams from my Father, Presidential Material: Barak Obama (a comic book treatment of Obama's background) and Kaiji Kawaguchi's Eagle: The Making of an Asian–American President. The first four texts are strictly non–fiction, whereas Kawaguchi's manga graphic novel is a fictionalized account. The point of including the graphic novel and comic book serve multiple purposes. On one level students will find engagement and investment in this unit through the use of the accessible and relevant genres of manga and comics. Secondly, specifically in Eagle, by extracting the discussion of personal background and legacy into the realm of fiction allows students to speculate and further investigate the possibility of anyone (themselves included) seeking and being elected to the office of President.
In particular, this unit is described for use in an inner–city classroom. The disenfranchisement of African–Americans stems from a multitude of elements including but not limited to the previous exclusion from voting, lack of interest or knowledge of the process and, arguably, apathy and/or disillusionment with a system of representative democracy that is seemingly still non–representative of the needs, desires and outcomes of their race. While some gains have been made with the election of Barack Obama, as the 2012 election race barrels ahead, the president still seems merely a figurehead unable to address issues of race. Because Obama is of mixed racial origin, there are some factions of the African–American community that do not consider him to be truly the embodiment of "blackness" in America. All of these factors contribute to a continued disjuncture between these classes of voters and their investment and participation in American politics.
The function this Unit serves is to open up the discussion of who becomes President and how do they go about doing it. This is designed for ninth graders, which is a time in a student's academic history that can make or break their future. By opening up this discussion of possibility and biography, students will hopefully become aware of the influence their own decisions have on their futures and the possibilities that can help them achieve their goals, be it Presidential or otherwise.
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