Invisible Cities: The Arts and Renewable Community

The Unit

This geography of North Tulsa—with a focus in and around one specific zip code—will be the basis of our exploration of the students' shared community. Two documents will focus on the contrast between nodes several miles both north and south of the Admiral/Peoria intersection in order to further illuminate qualities that define the North Tulsa where my students mostly live, and to explore the stereotypes associated with the place. The documents here, with the exception of one poem, tend towards the field of social sciences for the purpose of addressing specific objectives; other units throughout the year will feature literature and informational texts more specific to the CCSS for language arts.

Timeline and structure

The unit will take five to six weeks—more than half of a nine week semester. It may share time with a novel and other work we need to complete. The unit has three distinct segments. In the first, after reading and discussing Tupac Shakur's The Rose that Grew from Concrete to set our stage, we will spend one week defining "North Tulsa," or whatever they want to call their geographic area, from their perspective and others' via on-the-ground research along with artistic and written renderings. We'll take as our tools cameras, colored pencils and notebooks. On our large city map, we'll locate homes and favorite haunts.

The second segment is the academic centerpiece, filled with document studies and written responses to those documents. We'll use a variety of reading and writing strategies. We will cover one document every day or two, totaling six over a two week period. For each, we will complete one task of synthesis or analysis, usually written. The summative written assessment for this section will cover three of these texts. I'll be flexible about which six documents I use from my set in attempts to be sensitive to my students' interests and feedback. We can add to our big map locations for some of the schools, pool halls, and night clubs mentioned in our documents.

We'll revisit Tupac's poem upon beginning our third and final segment. This last phase of the unit will have us looking at the area with different glasses on, finding the beauty in geography, people, programs, architecture, and any other manifestation we can. This segment will cover up to two weeks and will have us back out of the classroom part time. In our seminar this year, we learned that there are many ways of looking at and experiencing a city. In and out of class, other members shared their maps, journeys, and perspectives. They were reflected in and inspired by some of our seminar readings. After our meeting one day, I walked through the bookstore to think and stumbled on a book of very personal poetic maps of Manhattan. Mapping Manhattan: a Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers is the inspiration behind the final project. After we use map-reading strategies and terms (scale, title, direction, purpose, legend) both to learn to read and use city maps in a practical sense, we'll translate these into map-making skills to create our own maps. For this map, students will create a Soul of my City map of the area we will have investigated—or their own, should they live outside of it and choose to do so.

This unit is adaptable for many secondary classrooms for students who live in socio-economically challenged areas, but much of it is adaptable for any zip code or geographic area, provided the teacher is willing to research and assemble documents for his/her students' geographies. This has, in fact, been a most fun and rewarding part of creating my unit.

Writing strategies

We'll be visiting basic prose and paragraph practices such as use of organization, topic sentences, thesis statements, and transition language at a basic level, adding complexity towards the end. We will compose in reflective and expository modes to explore each document alone or grouped with others. We'll use graphic organizers and collaboration to help create increasingly complex responses to our documents. They will learn proper text citation through modeling, mostly on the Promethean board. I use rubrics of varying styles and complexity for all but ungraded assignments like journals or comprehension checks. Rubrics are powerful tools to empower students to own their own writing and to learn from their peers'. Finally, we'll do some work with a few Common Core type summative assessments.

Reading strategies

We will study these texts for audience, style, purpose, content, and format, as appropriate the documents at hand. I will use a variety of comprehension strategies that have been successful with my students in particular. Some will be done collaboratively, some individually. Summarization is a necessary skill that many of my students have yet to master. They will practice summarizing part or all of the four prose documents. Guided reading, both oral and accompanied by graphic organizers, as well as targeted response prompts, are effective with struggling older readers. One targeted response tactic is for students to highlight passages they agree with, disagree with, or don't understand in different colors. This appropriate for pieces about which they are likely to have strong opinions. Use of some of these guided and oral reading strategies is reinforced by Rogers-Adkinson, et al. This will be my first year with a Promethean board (or Smart board); I will use that to teach annotation and to work through written pieces as a class.

We will also hone skills in reading maps, charts, and graphs—traditionally weak skills for my students. For charts and graphs, the students will summarize their findings in sentences or paragraphs and convert that information to an alternate form, such as from a table to a pie chart, to show their understanding of content.

Document selection

Some of my students seize up when most reading material is placed in front of them. Years of unsuccessful literary experiences have left them anxious. A selection of informational or non-fiction text would be especially discouraging to even more of them. Knowing that I needed to introduce them to just such examples caused me to be cautious. I knew they had to be engaging, relevant to their lives, short or segmented. I thought that if they had unexpected content that I could hold their attention a little longer. Research for a unit last year led me to what proved to be accurate criteria for at-risk youth. Diana Rogers-Adkinson and her team give four key criteria for text selection for use in the reading instruction of adjudicated youth. First, it should be culturally parallel to the lives 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." ³

Looking more closely this year into best text selection for Black males, I repeatedly found support for similar criteria to that for A.W. Tatum's "enabling texts." ⁴ Tatum's four criteria were that they "promote a healthy psyche"; "reflect an awareness of the real world"; "focus on the collective struggle of African Americans"; and "serve as a road map for being, doing, thinking, and acting." ⁵ The last three especially speak to this unit.

The CCSS balance the qualitative and quantitative measurements of text complexity against consideration of the task and the motivation and knowledge of the reader (cite this?). My objective is to not scare them off—and hopefully even engage them—while I introduce them to new genres of documents and new kinds of analytical writing that will help them be successful on a CC assessment. I do not want them to be intimidated by challenging vocabulary or overly complex writing samples, but I do want them to have experience with non-prose information like maps and graphs. Reading levels are low enough that these will be challenging enough for some. Their patience should be reserved for the potentially complex written task.

The Documents

The packet of documents I have compiled for classroom use are intended to engage them with provocative information about their community so that they are willing to engage in some more rigorous enterprise. These documents contain narratives written by government agencies, maps, graphs, news stories. As I start the unit, I may add or alter documents in the interest of student buy-in. The third and final segment of the unit will include one poem.

Study of Conditions among the Negro Population of Tulsa by Interracial Committee of Y.W.C.A., 1938. The document is arranged in four sections. (1) Health and sanitation: includes such details as how many beds were available for Negroes at the white hospitals, the higher-than-average rates of tuberculosis, and the lack of city garbage collection and disposal in some areas of North Tulsa; (2) Education in North Tulsa: documents the students and unexpectedly good standards at the few all-black schools. Of special interest to my students would be some of the areas of study available to students including sign-making and maid school, millenary, and home beautification and Negro history; (3) Recreation: documents the lack of parks and playgrounds but a proliferation of public dance halls, pool halls, night clubs moving picture houses, and recreational parlors. Very few of these exist in North Tulsa today. It suggests a community that is energetic and playful; (4) Delinquency: is the section my students will have the most fun with, probably. The presence and job description of a probation officer is little changed and fairly forward thinking; however, the "Areas of Delinquency" page shows that what were safer areas then are more dangerous now, and vice versa. It also shows the percentage for each type of delinquency—very different from today—and prevailing types by area. This section lists the causes and methods of rehabilitation of delinquents and ends with the statement that ordinances not enforced in North Tulsa include those at pool halls, dance halls, beer parlors and marble machines.

The Tulsa Urban League Presents a Concise Review of Housing Problems Affecting Negroes, 1958. This eleven page document gives a raw account description of the housing situation in North Tulsa. It documents conflicts arisen out of integration of below-middle-class whites in some fringe areas and gives very vivid descriptions of below-standard plumbing, waste disposal, and uninhabitable buildings and the outcomes of such conditions, such as increased crime and health issues. However, it also lays out a plan to categorize the housing conditions at the time and to address them by category and priority as prescribed by the new trend of Urban Renewal. At the time, 65% of the North Tulsa homes in question were deemed "sub-standard and beyond rehabilitation." ⁶ The first half of the document contains some gritty and startling detail. The second half which is more prescriptive is appropriate for practice in outlining and categorization and organization of information. A contrast to the previous document indicates that living conditions in North Tulsa deteriorated during the previous twenty years.

"Half Tulsa's Negroes Live in Poverty," a newspaper story from 1965. The article revisits the Urban Renewal movement mentioned in the 1958 document. While it reports a ten percent decrease in the number of sub-standard homes, the pace for change is slow. A panel discusses the need for education and training programs for semi-skilled jobs for the community. ⁷ With this third document, we can begin to trace economic and social trends in the community.

"North Tulsa Development Plan Sought" a newspaper story from 1997. 32 years after my previous article, the Metropolitan Tulsa Chamber of Commerce is spending a $70,000 grant to bring in someone to research a strategic plan to improve jobs and life in North Tulsa. ⁸ A poignant contrast to the other news article that underscores the fact that little has been done to improve the quality of life in the community.

"Sample Map for Phoenix Rising," 2013. This map is of our studied zip code. It indicates convenience stores and grocery stores. By this map, there are thirteen sources to buy food in the area. ⁹ Students can draw conclusions between this map and the two news stories or contrast it to their expectations of the 1938 report.

"Tulsa City County Map," 2013. We will use this map as a practice map for map skills. ¹⁰ Throughout the unit, we can mark homes, favorite spots and sites from our documents that no longer exist.

"Business Comparison" chart, 2013. This table shows businesses and jobs within a one-, two-, and three-mile radius of our key node in North Tulsa. The farther one gets from the center of this circle, the more jobs there are. ¹¹

"Educational Attainment Total," 2013 contrasts North Tulsa and Midtown zip codes. This draws a clear connection between education and standard of living, an important message for my students. ¹²

"Consumer Expenditure Comparison," 2013. This table contrasts spending habits between North and South Tulsa zip codes and covers everything, including food, technology, alcoholic beverages, books, and travel. ¹³ There are some surprises and students will have fun drawing their own conclusions about the stories behind the numbers.

"Mosaic Household Comparison," 2013. Within a one-, two-, and three-mile radius of our key node, this table measures the percentage of residents who figure into each of twenty socio-economic categories, created for marketing purposes. 88.7% of the households within the central mile fall into the lowest measurement of economic worth. ¹⁴ While the overall impression of these results is the same, different skills are needed to comprehend the content. Together, though, they do show the dynamic nature of socio-economic measurement by geography and issue.

Other documents measure or contrast internet use and access, grocery purchases, reading materials, and housing units.