Rationale
Back when I was a sophomore in high school, in the district where I currently teach, I recall sitting in a Theater Arts class. At the time I simply wanted an easy course to take, but what I found out some 22 years later was that, it was in that class that I discovered how I would purposefully choose to speak from then until now. We had been asked by the teacher to play a game where we would have to mimic the voice, persona, or character of the person to our left. I grew up in the hood and we spoke differently, very differently from those who did not. We were considered heavy speakers of the dialect known as African American English or AAE. When it was my turn I recall making my voice to sound like the characters from the movie Clueless and the class erupting in laughter at my creativity. I began speaking like this as my own discipline of rhetoric, as sort of having an alter ego, but with regards to my own personal dialogue.
After having done this for practically all of my life, especially when answering phone calls, replicating the voice on the other end of the call, and being both publicly and privately praised and ridiculed for it, I have come to find that there is a technical name for this phenomenon. It is referred to as code switching, having a home dialect and the dialect spoken at school. This was especially apparent when I realized also, since becoming a teacher, that I have students who unbeknownst to them, do this all the time as well. For my students it spills over into their academic writing which proves detrimental to the crafting and creating of characters which includes descriptions other than adjectives.
Jessica Brantley showcased in her seminar, “Reading for Writing: Modeling the Modern Essay” several qualities good readers should obtain in order to become a good writer. One quality was how reading essays across different genres (memoire, autobiography, personal experience, personal narrative, personal essay, creative nonfiction, personal nonfiction, etc.) would help to mold my very own personal essay; this technique could also translate into my very own classroom with my students. Another thing taken from this seminar was to expose readers (my students) to essays, books, prose that reflects their interests as learners at various levels of difficulty that will undoubtedly prepare them for future challenging texts and writing that will be assigned to them.
The purpose of this unit is not to imply that how these students speak alludes to their competency level nor is it aimed to try to fix the way students speak or to make them feel inferior for how they speak. The purpose of this unit is to connect reading and writing. After exposing students to some of the essays we discussed in seminar, it will enrich students culturally and diversely and inspire student writing, thus improving student writing. Another aspect of this unit will be to prepare students for when they will be writing a personal experience essay and how it is advantageous to write beautifully and creatively for specific audiences. The purpose of this unit is to also empower students by explicitly telling them what code switching is, and to exploit what they unintentionally do, so that their writing is more polished and academically acceptable. Students need to know that code switching is an integral part of my life and theirs, and that it could be viewed as knowing multiple languages. This unit will also teach students that each language (African American English, Spanglish, and Standard American English) has its place and purpose in which the world we live but discernment is definitely required especially when writing personal experience essays. We will read essays (Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tongue Tied, Richard Rodriguez’s Aria, Gloria Anzaldua’s How to Tame a Wild Tongue, and Frederick Douglass’ Learning to Read) in class and will have in depth discussions about word choice, author’s purpose, who is the audience intended to be for each essay, and the genre of the essay itself. These essays will be paired with children’s picture books, in the way of a paired selection. (I Love My Hair by Natasha Anastasia Tarpley, I Love Saturdays y Domingo by Alma Flor Ada, Big Mama’s by Donald Crews, and Tameka’s New Dress by Ronnie Sidney II) After class discussions, students will begin to write their own personal narrative essay, which we will then peer review, just as we did in seminar.
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