Selecting Student Readings
In designing a unit that is flexible enough to be used across grade levels, I have paid attention to the readings I have selected for each level. At each level, the essays I have listed in the resources section deal with the broad topic of becoming or growing as a writer or as a reader, but there are a few distinct differences between the readings I have listed for each of the grade levels.
One of the considerations when selecting texts was obviously student reading ability. I have tried to select, in the texts I have listed in the resources section below, essays that will meet the specific needs at each of the grades I teach. In my tenth-grade classroom students range from a sixth-grade reading level to a post-college level. This range of abilities makes it difficult to select a single text that will meet each student’s needs. What works well in these instances is providing a text that is at grade level, but with additional support for some of the students who find it too challenging. The support can come in the form of graphic organizers, frontloading information before reading, strategies for active reading and annotation, reading guides, shortening texts, and audiobooks. Enrichment can also be helpful for students who are find the text too simple, such as having those students to develop the questions that will be used in class discussion, providing an additional text for comparison, or using those students to work with the more challenged ones so that they might both benefit from the partnership.
Perhaps more importantly, I have also thought about the specific content and subject of the essays I have selected as student readings. In doing so, I have tried to connect the topics for this unit with what will come in the following units for each grade. In tenth grade, the second unit I teach deals with the topic of social justice. For this unit on audience and purpose I have selected essays that deal with language, communication, and writing with a social justice slant.
Jaswinder Bolina was born in Chicago to parents who immigrated from Punjab. In his essay, “Writing Like a White Guy: On Language, Race, and Poetry,” he moves from describing the difficulties he has faced in publishing poetry as an Other who has assimilated fully into the white-American culture with which he is surrounded. His father advises him to submit his work under a pseudonym while others advise him to write about the minority experience in America; neither of these options appeals to Bolina. The essay develops into an analysis of race’s impact on perception of the individual and the role language plays in one’s own understanding of his place in the confusing interplay of culture, race, and perception.
Bolina’s essay will pose an interesting question for students considering the role of language in their own identity. Students for whom a different language might be their native tongue or might be the language of their parents, this essay will have a direct point of connection, but for students who don’t know the impact of another language or darker skin on public perception, this piece will be more eye-opening. Either way, Bolina’s essay presents avenues toward introspection for any reader. In using this essay as a mentor text, my focus will be on the way Bolina structures his essay, alternating between his own personal experiences and the larger topic of race in the United States. Everything in his essay hinges on his experiences as a minority writer in America, but he uses that experience to talk about the much deeper implication of race in America. For students to successfully develop their essays to draw a larger public point out of a personal experience with language is one of the main goals of using this piece. Students will pay special attention to the role of audience and purpose in developing a public point in an essay.
Frederick Douglass’s “Learning to Read” describes not only the difficulties of a slave trying to acquire the skills of reading, and eventually writing, in a society that denies him that right, but it shows from Douglass’s perspective, the power that comes with the ability to work with the written word. His essay presents characters, mostly white, who have varying degrees of power, but from whom he gains even more power through the acquisition of language.
Students may be familiar with Douglass’s text but looking at it in terms of the power of language is specific to this unit. Whether revisiting the text or experiencing it for the first time, students will be asked to think about their own experiences with learning to read and write and whether or not the notion of it being empowering holds true for their own experience. Douglass develops much of his essay through brief character sketches—his mistress, poor white neighborhood children, Irish laborers—and through short narrative descriptions of the learning he undertook independently. In using this text as a model, my hope is for students to understand the power of weaving a narrative together from multiple shorter examples. Students will consider who Douglass was writing for and the purpose of structuring his essay through multiple shorter narratives.
Richard Rodriguez’s “Aria” presents his controversial argument against bilingual education. He describes growing up in a world of two languages: Spanish, a private language, and English, a public language. The essay describes his eventual estrangement from the Spanish language, the associated culture, and even his family as he further assimilated into American culture and the English language, but these are positive to Rodriguez’s understanding of the immigrant experience in America. He views this detachment as necessary for his own identification as an American.
For students, Rodriguez’s essay provides a strong example of an essay in which personal experiences are pieced together with argumentative writing to develop a strong public point. Often, students are taught modes of writing—argumentative, descriptive, narrative—as distinct forms. In reality, authors regularly combine these modes depending on the desired effect in a certain part of the piece. An essay that is predominantly narrative in nature might rely on argumentative sections just as a descriptive piece might contain some elements of narrative. For students to be able to successfully blend the basic modes of writing to achieve a specific effect or purpose in writing is an important skill in growing as writers. Students will also consider the audience Rodriguez is addressing in his essay and whether the meaning is the same for different audiences.
Malcolm X’s “Learning to Read” recounts the realization X came to while serving a sentence in Norfolk Prison Colony— “trying to write simple English, I not only wasn’t articulate, I wasn’t even functional.”9 He took on the challenge of educating himself with the initial purpose of reading to improve his writing. This grew into an insatiable appetite for knowledge from books. This passage moves from the personal narrative of his experiences with books, becoming a more adept reader, and then a more articulate writer and speaker to the historical and political learning that came with his new found love of the written word.
X’s narrative is a fantastic example of a structure that moves between a personal narrative that can be inspirational at face value—in this case, learning to read—and explanatory writing that aims to teach the audience about something specific—here X presents historical information about the history of slavery and the oppression of African-Americans in this country. For students, this is an opportunity to blend their own knowledge on a subject with their personal experience that led them to that knowledge. I can see for instance, a student’s love of graphic novels leading to an essay that teaches the audience about the evolution of characters or the intricacies of the art work. In analyzing this passage from X’s work, students will consider his intended audience and the desired purpose of his writing.
Depending on the specifics of my class (student interest, reading ability, and prior experience), I will be selecting two texts from the four above—Bolina, Douglass, Rodriguez, and X—to use as the core readings of the unit. Students will study these two essays during the second week of the unit. Lessons will be targeted at not only understanding the content of the writing—the public point or philosophical underpinnings of the essay—but the structural component of the writing that I want students to imitate in their own writing.
Just as each of these essays deals with the main topics of both units—reading, writing, and language for this unit, and race and social justice which connects to the upcoming unit. Using these dual-purpose readings, ones that can be drawn upon by students as points of reference in future areas of the coursework, will provide a richer experience and will help students to realize the interconnectedness of what they are learning throughout the year. Similarly, the essays selected for my eleventh-graders connect to the topic of private versus public writing and the texts for my senior-class have a political theme; both of these topics connect to the respective classes’ second units.
In selecting readings for their own adaptation of this unit, I recommend that other teachers use my lists as starting point, but also consider what they will be teaching in their own classrooms in the units that follow this one and try to select texts that will serve the purpose of connecting the experience for their students as well. There are many good texts on becoming a writer or a reader.
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