Literature and Information

Strategies and activities

My strategies are usually a balance of standard language arts classroom ones and experiments geared for my very at-risk students. In response to reflection of previous units and trials last year, I’m including more Google drive use, more physical learning, and more visual literacy to pair with textual literacy. Students who suffer from severe or regular trauma can benefit from writing—a lot—especially personal and reflective writing.

Image literacy

We are bombarded with imagery all day. It makes sense that we include critical “seeing” along with our critical reading. My students are very responsive to image, especially some of the struggling readers. Image fills in gaps in understanding and reinforces strategies for analysis. Some see form in image more clearly than in text. The learned skills can eventually translate to textual analysis. They are often more comfortable collaborating around an image than a text, as well. There are a variety of specific strategies here. What I choose depends on the kinds of images we’re studying. For the 1921 photos, we’ll look at perspective, setting, period details, mood and tone, the subjects and their body language, and maybe composition. Another set of questions I might use for my younger students is 1. What do you see, hear, and smell? 2. What is going on? 3. What do the subjects feel? 4. What do you feel?

Image literacy activity

For this activity we’ll use Tim Madigan’s photo essay Before Ferguson, There was Tulsa. (There are so many images one could use from Tulsa resources. I am working with these for easy access as well as quality.) The first photo is of a man in overalls holding both hands in the air. We will also look at the second photo, of one black man standing in an ambiguous movement over a dead man whose face is covered. Photo number three is of a woman, with others, looking out of the back of a wagon that is carrying her to a holding station. My students will want to use photo number eight, which has more action. Black and white men—only the latter are armed—are piled into an open car with one standing on the sideboard. Motion and tension pervade the picture. The last photo is in a clean white hospital room. Dark faces and hands are in stark contrast to everything else. Expressions cover a variety of emotions, but body language is significant here, too. We’ll follow this up with an image of black and white protestors in Ferguson with their hands up, in unplanned imitation of the Black men being marched to the ball park of Tulsa (described two paragraphs below).

One at a time, we’ll study the photos on the Promethean board. I will model to students how they might “annotate the picture” by writing, drawing, highlighting elements of the photo like they would a text then turn that over to them, hopefully. After discussing each image as a class, I’ll distribute the images to pairs or groups where they will find excerpts from our readings that match the images. They’ll present to the class, explaining their deeper understandings of the images and their reasons for selecting those excerpts. We’ll spend additional time comparing and contrasting the two photos, past and present, of the marchers with their hands up (described below) and maybe add a written response to them.

Kinesthetic tableaus

Using bodies and faces to enact scenes and emotions bridges cognitive and emotional understanding and reinforces emotional intelligence which is important but sometimes a weakness for my students. Physical learning also breaks down classroom norms of behavior and experience and encourages students to take risks. They will experience vicarious emotion and physicality by recreating photographs with their bodies and faces. There are two sides to this; classmates are also invited to interpret what they see, now that it is more concrete live and in front of them, in a less abstract form. Actors and witnesses can reflect in writing and conversation.  Kinesthetic tableaus and visual literacy skills will be used together at times. In addition to other photos, I’ll depend heavily on the Before Ferguson… photos. We will definitely use numbers one, two, three, and eight—described above. In addition, I will use number ten, one of the most famous riot photos. Its caption in the Tulsa Tribune article was “Blacks Taken into Custody form Motley Parade to Ballpark.” Number 12 depicts a white family as they go through the belongings of Greenwood residents. One stares defiantly at the camera with a gun hanging by his side; others go through items seemingly unaware of the camera. It is the representation of one kind of white family during the riot.

Kinesthetic tableau activity

As they enter the room, students will choose a table by the photograph or photographs on it. (Alternately, depending on the make-up of the class, I may assign the photos to groups for more dependable results.) They will have up to fifteen minutes to analyze the photo. Towards the end I’ll give them additional time and an inclusive list of emotion words. They will select appropriate words for the faces they see. They’ll spend the next small chunk of time recreating the photos with special attention to body language and facial expression. They will photograph their tableaus for discussion afterwards. Each student will do a reflective journal to discuss how they felt about the photo before and after studying it and creating their interpretive tableau.  As a class we’ll debrief the activity and discuss its use in other situations.

Close reading strategies for poetry

Poetry is usually a weakness for my students. They often are more successful beginning with lyrics or verse with which they are already familiar. Because these poems have context and they’ll be developing some mastery of the content, I hope they will be receptive to some traditional forms in addition to more accessible contemporary ones. I am more successful with more simple strategies than those with too many steps (like TPCASTT—which language arts teachers will know). I’ve been sticking to these steps and encouraging the students to add two questions of their own: 1) Title—what is it and what does it suggest to you? 2) Summary—find the main idea. 3) Specific language—look up words you don’t know and catalog and think about the images and words that stand out. 4) Theme—what happens when you add title, summary, imagery and language together? The students or I can follow up with additional questions about other elements like tone, form, poem, or context as the poem dictates. We practice annotation with everything I can reproduce for them to write on. I regularly stress the importance of writing on documents and annotating whenever the situation allows.

Poetry activities

I will give students printed copies (which they can write on) of Countee Cullen’s Incident and Mari Evans’s Alarm Clock. They will read them silently then I or a volunteer will read them aloud. I will model annotating part of one on the Elmo then turn them over to their personal annotations and the questions above. Depending on students present, we may do more of this together (many of them struggle with annotation and close reading but the more we do it the better they get). For the same reasons they may also pair up for this. Together we will discuss our answers, find several topics of compare and contrast (like theme, setting, voice or tone), and create Venn diagrams to organize their thoughts.

Towards the end of the unit we’ll listen to Anastasia Tolbert’s What to Tell My Sons after Trayvon Martin. Without a written transcript we’ll listen to the poem several times. They will take notes on what they hear. If we need to we’ll listen again. I’ll give each student five sticky notes. Each student will write five words, phrases, or images that stood out to them, one on each note. We’ll put these on the wall and then organize them into categories that appear, like emotion, personal experience, powerful language, or theme. This organizer will drive our discussion of them poem. Finally, for each of the categories, each student will write a sentence or two summarizing our decisions about the poem.

Writing

I want student writing to be directly responsive to what they’ve learned from text. This is where they will show they understand the elements of the seminar I think are most important to them; namely, they will discover fact and truth in fiction, and humanity and literature in nonfiction. Two of my previous units have emphasized personal writing—autobiography and memoir. This time I want their writing to be more critical and outwardly focused. In some cases working through the planning and prewriting stages will be enough, as with the Venn diagram for the two poems (above). Other assignments will include more attention to skill and development and use more of the process. Short pieces will explore critically literary and historical elements in fiction and nonfiction. Creative writings will give them other ways to display their understandings. Examples might be persona pieces, or they might create new personal statements for social media or in short video essays. Writing assessment is rubric based. Quality peer feedback is a goal that we struggle with but work towards.