Literature, Life-Writing, and Identity

Teaching Strategies and Activities

This unit is developed to be taught over the course of an entire school year to both fourth and fifth grade classes. Texts and activities can be singled out for use to suit the needs of most middle-grade language arts classrooms. The focus of the unit moves from the topic of identity, to identity of persons with disabilities, and back to shaping personal and collective identity. Each resource was chosen to cause students to reflect on their expectations of human capabilities and how they shape identity. The following table outlines the break-out of resources and activities specified for each level, for the school year. Accompanying the table are explanations of several activities and strategies to be used.

General Strategies

Assessing Prior Knowledge

The introductory to the unit will be to uncover student awareness with regard to their perceptions about physical and mental challenges.  What vocabulary do they have to express these differences?  What do they already know about particular physical and mental disabilities?  What do they perceive are the limitations and challenges people with disabilities face?  What are their fears and insecurities regarding people living with disabilities?  Most importantly, who decides whether something counts as a disability?  We will use a strengths inventory to discover our own preferences and limitations as an entry point for thinking about the label of disability. Since there are hundreds available online, I will show students samples which prove there are many ways to discern a person’s strengths, and that a person’s set of strengths are varied indeed.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

As mentioned above, Universal Design for Learning promotes a set of principles that are a blueprint of practices so that all individuals receive equal opportunities to learn. The National Center on Universal Design for Learning has researched a set of flexible approaches tailored to what, why, and how we learn.¹⁰ UDL is steeped in neuroscience and seeks to teach to those three key areas of learning. The key to lesson planning with UDL principles in mind is the term “multiple means.” This method espouses the presentation, differentiation, and engagement of students in as many ways as possible.

The first principle is to provide multiple means of presentation.  In the case of reading texts, a suitable choice under this category would be reading aloud, or providing audio versions of texts whenever possible.  The second principle, differentiation, is considering multiple means of expression in student assignments and projects, which aligns with reading, writing, speaking and listening. Finally, under the broad category of engagement, is choice and authenticity. Throughout the teaching of this units, students will be given choice during reading (independently, with a partner, with audio, or with the teacher) and responding (written versus auditory or pictorial) to demonstrate their learning.  There will also be a variety of supplemental texts for their individual enrichment choices.

Arts Integration

How do the arts give an identity, a voice to persons with disabilities? The very act of being disabled causes creativity in that the artist may have to interact with their medium in non-traditional ways.  Working with my school’s related arts team, students will be exposed to artists, dancers, composers, poets, and writers living with and creating through disability at key times throughout the school year. Jorge Drexler’s Ted Talk, “Music, Poetry, and Identity” will be shown to weave the arts into this identity fabric. This unit will allow students to collaborate with their art, music, and instrumental instructors to create culminating projects that demonstrate their self-concept and group identity. The choice in their project aligns with the third principle in the Universal Design for Learning.

Reading Strategies and Activities

Close Reading and Annotating Text

Close Reading is a key requirement in Common Core State Standards for all students beginning in grade three.  Once the foundational skills have been taught, we seek to teach comprehension in deep and meaningful ways in order to ensure our students are college and career-ready.  Close Reading promotes the kind of critical analysis of text to help students acquire more than a superficial summary understanding of what is read.  We will read key pieces of text repeatedly, while looking for evidence which reveals a particular viewpoint, plot element, or literary device. We will use this technique with each main novel as well as with pieces of the other novels mentioned as time permits.

Annotating text is a metacognitive strategy which allows all students to engage with the text during reading whereby they mark, comment, and think about parts of the story they find surprising, interesting, enlightening or confusing.  Annotating brings the text to life as an interactive force to allow us as teachers to see our students thinking as they move through a body of work.  Students will annotate selected chapters of each text we read and/or have access to post-it-notes to engage with the text as they read.

Read Like a Reader/Read Like a Writer

Two modes for looking at our works will be employed. Accompanying the Close Reading strategy, this means of looking at text allows students to view the story as a narrative device, as well as think about specific choices an author makes to develop character, plot, and setting within the narrative realm. When we read like a reader, we might think of this as the “normal” way of reading in which we try to figure out what a piece of writing means by understanding the words a writer is using. Reading like a reader employs the metacognitive strategies of questioning, predicting, inferring, feeling, connecting, and evaluating.

When we read from the perspective of a writer, we focus less on what the writer is trying to say and more on how the writer is saying it. Reading like a writer demands we delve into the areas of ideas or content, organization, voice, word choice, and sentence fluency.  Specifically, we look at

the techniques the writer is using to get his or her message across and how those techniques affect us as we experience the text.¹¹

Viewing, Speaking, and Listening Activities

Listening/Viewing/Discussion Opportunities

The establishment of group norms for discussing issues outlined above will promote discourse in our work to unearth similarities between ourselves and persons with disabilities as well as emphasize strengths of the disabled. Essential to that understanding is dispelling the myth of the monster in instances of physical disability.  Children with physical disabilities need extra help performing certain tasks, just as all classroom students seek teacher assistance during certain projects or lessons.  Keeping in mind our own set of strengths and weaknesses, the discussions will highlight the ways in which our novel characters were assisted with the right type of device or communication.  We will use the people-first strategy of communicating about these disabilities, as outlined in the table above. Turn and Talk, where students in close proximity share their thinking, will be utilized as a means to allow students to try-out their thinking before discussing with the larger group.  Inside-out circles, where a smaller group discusses relevant themes, while the larger, outside group listens, will be one way of moderating book discussions and giving all voices a change to be heard.

Other media examples dealing with identity and/or disabled persons will be utilized.

First is the Ted Talk. One talk, by Brian Little, titled “Who Are You, Really?” This 15-minute lecture delves into character traits and personality, and how they don’t necessarily define you.

As described in the talk’s description, psychologist Brian Little is more interested in moments when we transcend those traits -- sometimes because our culture demands it of us, and sometimes because we demand it of ourselves. Little dissects the surprising differences between introverts and extroverts and explains why your personality may be more malleable than you think. This talk will get students thinking about one aspect of their identity.  Another, by Julian Baggini, is titled “Is There a Real You?”, also challenges our ideas about identity and personality. Baggini is the author of the adult book The Ego Trick which serves to prove that our identity is fluid and changing over time.

Next is the podcast. Represented on several podcasts such as Re: Sound, Transom, and Radiolab, is the story of Khon.  Podcast producer Andy Mills is the friend of Khon. After an accident, Khon had a change in his speech so that he talks very slowly, yet hears himself at regular speed.  The story brings to light the self-awareness that Khon receives when he hears himself singing on tape and realizes the difference in his own voice.

Finally, the film Life Animated will be shown. Based on the book by Ron Suskind, the film tells the story of his son Owen, who was unable to communicate.  With the help of Disney films, Owen learned how to express himself and interact with his world using Disney role models to teach him how to share himself with the world-at-large.

Agencies such as the Western Pennsylvania School for Blind Children, and School for the Deaf will be contacted with regard to how we might partner and give students some hands-on experiences with classroom visits to enrich the unit. A final culminating speaking project will allow those students who wish to teach on the topic to visit other classrooms in our building, read and share a picture book on disabilities, and teach a mini-lesson to that group of students.

Writing Strategies

Journaling/Responding/Interactive Reading

Students will be asked to keep a journal where they reflect on issues of identity in their own lives throughout the course of the unit. These journals will serve as brainstorming and conference topics to assist them in formulating their narrative writing. Their journals will also serve as a reader’s response piece where they record what they notice and wonder as we read. Guiding general questions will serve as a check for understanding. There are four main question stems which are: “What is going on?”, “How do you know?”, “Who are the characters?”, and “How do the events fit/stray from what we know about them?”

Text Dependent Analysis

The Text-Dependent Analysis essay, or TDA is a requirement on the Pennsylvania State Assessment given to all PA public school students beginning in grade 4. Students must support a thesis developed from a prompt, which asks them for evidence from one or more pieces of text and an analysis of each piece. Students will use transcripts from talks and film viewed, along with novel selections to state their theory of identity as a culminating activity.

Writing the Personal and Fictional Narrative

To deepen the writing content of the personal narrative, we will use the topic of identity to help us shape writing in the required personal and fictional narratives. This unit will utilize the sibling experience to help students with their own life-writing, in thinking about the positive or negative impact a sibling’s identity brings to their lives. I would like them to determine the significance of sibling influence on individual identity.  In the case of an only child, what other influences substitute for a sibling’s influence on identity? In fictional narratives, an understanding of personal vs. collective identity can help them shape their plot in a much more sophisticated fashion than just thinking at their level as the plot being the “problem” in their writing.  In this way, their writing can naturally develop into more reflective pieces as they look for those signs in everything they read. Students will reflect on the changes, challenges, and growth of the examples from novels and media, and will use their journals as a source of reflection and direction for their own writing.