My Biography Assumptions
For the nine years that I actually facilitated students' efforts during the Brotherhood project, I operated under two overarching assumptions. I taught my seventh grade students how to find biographical research, take notes, organize their notes, transfer those notes into a five paragraph essay, and then properly cite their sources using the MLA format. I am embarrassed to say that not once in those nine years did I ever think to teach the children about how a biography (and thus their essay and oral presentation), while technically non-fiction, is really a story complete with all of the elements of fiction, those juicy details, that make a story worth reading. In hindsight, through the years, some students inherently understood this distinction but a large majority did not.
The second assumption I made was that the students could and would automatically make the text-to-self connection. As Nigel Hamilton explained in How To Do Biography: A Primer, "…the intrinsic aim of biography…[is] to penetrate the moral core of a life, to interpret it – and thereby not only learn facts and information but acquire insight and lessons that could be serviceable in one's own life, either as warnings or inspiration." 1 I believed the very structure of the Brotherhood project 2 facilitated this connection. It was not until reading Hamilton's book I discovered what had been missing in the performance of my students, which harkened back to the Jack Webb "Just the Facts" days. 3 My students did not tell anecdotal stories either in their written or oral presentations that highlighted their character's trials in such a way as to be personally instructive.
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