Classroom Activities
Sequentially, the following classroom activities should take place after group discussion and guided exploration of text and ideas. These activities offer a more independent place for students to engage in self-exploration and respond to major unit themes. By merging Language Arts objectives with identity-work strategies, students can meet academic goals while engaging in identity care.
Although each activity fits with this unit’s texts, they are easily adaptable. Simply model each activity using a character from a shared text you choose before students work on their own.
Map of Changes
On a chronological timeline, students map out moments of their lives when they experienced change. Keep in mind that recalling so much history and organizing them into a timeline of change can be a daunting task for some students. Our memory naturally minimizes some changes. A scary trip to a new place can quickly ease into a benign memory when we’re comfortable with our new surroundings. To prompt a range of life changes for the timeline, list specific areas that students must include on their timeline. For example, I’ll ask students to include changes in school, personal or athletic arenas, geographic changes, and family changes. Some students may wish to work in layers, first creating a timeline of school changes and then starting at the beginning of the timeline again to layer on events from another part of their life.
The life map serves as brainstorming for the subsequent activity but it’s also an act of self-affirmation. As students chronicle the changes in their lives --even the ones they had forgotten-- they also remind themselves of the challenges they’ve overcome. When a student adds a timeline marker of her family’s month in a homeless shelter, for example, it’s a mental high-five that she’s still standing. For some students, a map of changes may have an identity-broadening effect as well. A student who was just cut from the club soccer team that she spent all summer practicing for might note how many other areas of her life are present on the timeline.
Navigating Change Narrative
Using a moment from their map of changes timeline, students draft an essay about the strengths and skills that helped them navigate unwanted change. One student could choose a grade-level transition where he didn’t back away from failure while another might select an unwanted move to a new neighborhood where she coped by making friends with people she didn’t like at first.
This assignment is purposefully-optimistic: students are asked to reflect on specific strengths and skills to get them thinking about their own adequacy. The narrative students write serves as a classic act of self-affirmation, a chance to remind themselves of the parts of their identity that help them get through challenging times. Even students who tell stories in which they reacted badly at one or more points during a change still show a willingness to learn from being wrong. Intentional self-correction is worth celebrating!
In this activity, the writing process lends itself perfectly to the slow, careful thinking of purposeful identity work. After each draft, students should read for intention. Some students might notice that their writing portrays change and resolution with no action from the characters in the story. But is that true? How, exactly, did the character react or respond to the change? A second or third draft revision that includes more character action gives students credit for their part in adjusting to change. Just as first drafts beg for thoughtful revisions, student stories deserve careful attention to oversimplification and reliance on damaging master narratives.
Letter of Advice
In this activity, students compose letters of advice to a fictional peer experiencing a similar change. For example, a student who recently weathered an apartment eviction might offer advice to an imaginary student forced to leave her home. The map of changes they created earlier in the unit may provide helpful ideas so that students can self-select the situations on which they want to give advice.
Although this activity mimics the self-affirmation goals of a narrative, the difference in writing genre offers a chance to advise in second person. Some students may be more willing to give vulnerable advice and explore their feelings when they don’t have to claim it so directly in first person. Giving advice functions as a positive forward-looking story. Although students aren’t directly claiming future actions for themselves, they get the chance to explore models of how they might respond to future changes. Writing to someone else is a chance to imagine a future that they aren’t yet able to claim themselves.
Since letter writing may be an unfamiliar genre for some students, we’ll practice writing fictional letters of advice from the main characters of our shared texts before embarking on individual work. For example, students might pose as Parvana scribbling advice on taking on extra family chores or as Esperanza doling out suggestions for handling the loss of her homeland.
Family Interviews
As the capstone activity to the unit, students will interview at least one important person in their life, preferably a parent or grandparent, about what identities they hope to pass on. It’s a chance to allow a role model to create a hopeful, forward-facing story. What kind of person does your grandmother want you to be? What advice do they have for you when you are experiencing difficult change? What hopes does your father have for your future?
Using handheld audio recorders or cell phone recording apps, students will record their interviews before they turn them into a written product. After they’ve listened and reflected on their interview(s), they’ll write a vision for the future statement in which they combine their own dreams with those of their family and community. I suggest a bit of creative space for the process here. Students who choose to interview more than one role model or family member might start by just compiling future visions before figuring out how to insert their own views while others might jump straight into a first-person future vision with a family member’s words as back-up.
For some students, a family interview will provide much-needed affirmation. For others, it may bolster parts of their identities that aren’t always celebrated in school. For example, a parent may invoke an important aspect of faith or cultural history that can broaden a student’s identity. But most importantly, this activity helps students to envision a future successful self.
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