Objectives
This unit combines academic reading and writing goals with identity work. First, students read and analyze young adult fiction books in addition to several poems. Each offers stories of protagonists navigating unwanted change. In accordance with Oklahoma Academic Standards, the texts I’ve selected for this unit will require students to engage in discussion and make connections between and within texts.
In response to text and classroom discussions of change, students will write often and in varied forms. Some writing forms we’ll use include journal entries, text analysis, text comparison, personal narrative, and personal letters. Using the recursive writing process called for by both Oklahoma Academic Standards and the Common Core State Standards, students will analyze their writing based on their intent to communicate. They’ll ask themselves questions such as, Does your intended meaning come through in this piece? Is this what you meant to make the reader feel? By starting with meaning, students harness their writing skills and build new ones in service of their ideas. In the strategies section, I’ll discuss the way we’ll use audio recording to improve writing reflection.
Finally, students participate in their own identity-supporting work, mostly in the form of personal narrative writing. The goal here is to support self-adequacy narratives and provide strategies for managing identity during moments of change. After all, self-orientation in a new situation can make all the difference. Psychologist David Yeager and his team of writers put it this way: “When individuals perceive that they possess sufficient resources to cope with the situational demands posed by stressors, they experience challenge. However, when situational demands are seen as exceeding resources, individuals experience threat.”3 A self-narrative focused on positive aspects of identity, as Cohen et al, explains, “gives people enough optimism to ‘stay in the game’ in the face of daily onslaught of threats, slights, challenges, aggravations, and setbacks.” 4 In other words, while this unit’s goal for identity support is immediate, the ultimate goal is to offer students strategies for managing lifelong identity changes.
This unit acknowledges that trauma may be part of managing identity during unwanted change, but the focus is not on trauma management specifically. Rather, students engage in identity work meant to support changes of many kinds. Later, I’ll discuss the four specific identity work approaches that shape the reading and writing work students will do.
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