Rationale
This unit attempts to address these two flaws of close reading by focusing on the works of Langston Hughes through a combination of a close reading framework and a historical thinking framework.
While this goal can be achieved with many different literary persons, the focus on Hughes brings about the opportunity to dissect rich literature and talk about social concerns affecting our world today.
Langston Hughes began his literary career when “books happened to” him. Hughes' work will be the cornerstone of our unit because his poetry is ripe with figurative language for close reading and his writing draws from his personal culture and for its reflection of the Harlem Renaissance for historical analysis. Furthermore, his work centers on the lived experiences of Black Americans in a way that sheds light on the inequalities faced that are prevalent to this day.
At a time where our school community fought a year-long campaign to remove police officers from our campuses, amid a year of protesting police brutality, and with the never-ending circulation of stories paraded on social media exemplifying racism in our everyday lives, these themes are not just relatable for students, but crucial to our understanding of racism in our current time.
This will culminate in an understanding of how writers are architects of language who use the full range of their lived experiences, historical context, and identity to build their writing.
In this way, I hope to empower students to read with the curiosity to unpack and to write as architects of their own stories grounded in their historical moments.
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