Objectives
My objectives are to develop writers who know their own history, and can carry on a tradition of fierce self-determination, freeing themselves and others. They will appreciate the complexity of the Black Power era and the Black Arts Movement along with it, and see how hip-hop evolved from the movement through reading literature and film, as well as by doing various exercises to build their reading and writing skills. More specifically, my students will be creating a "choreopoem" modeled on the dynamic work of Ntozake Shange in for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf. Each writer will be directed to examine a personal or political event from her or his own life and develop a poetic play that explores the multiple viewpoints of the characters involved.
Students will also create a biographical power point presentation of a literary or political figure based upon research gathered from reading one of the memoirs in groups during the semester. In these groups, students will choose from a host of memoirs in the classroom library or elsewhere, including Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), Eldridge Cleaver's Soul On Ice (1974), Assata Shakur's Assata (1987), Earl Anthony's Spitting In The Wind (1990), Elaine Brown's A Taste of Power (1992), David Hilliard's This Side of Glory (1993), Evelyn Williams's Inadmissible Evidence (1993), George Jackson's Soledad Brother (1994), Huey Newton's Revolutionary Suicide (reprinted 1995) and William Brent's Long Time Gone (1996). Additional books will include autobiographies by Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, and Kathleen Cleaver. While reading, students will be creating their power point presentations with partners, groups, or even independently, though with an emphasis on collaborative work.
While students are at work reading independently out of class, in class we will read and discuss poems by Amiri Baraka, such as "Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note," "SOS," and "Black Art"; Sonia Sanchez's "blk/rhetoric," "to all brothers," "we a baddddd people" (1970), and "homegirls & hand grenades" (1985); as many selections as possible from The Black Poets, Edited by Dudley Randall.
Additionally, classes will be supplemented by readings from Marable & Mullings textual anthology Let Nobody Turn Us Around, including excerpts about SNCC, Black Panthers, CORE and —. According to the Common Core Standards students are expected to read and respond to non-fiction in at least 70% of their reading load; one day a week will be spent writing constructed responses to these primary sources, following my school district's mandate.
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