Introduction
Serving a majority minority low-income student population presents teachers with many challenges, especially following a year of virtual learning and a difficult year back in school. At our school, George Wythe High School in Richmond, Virginia, the first challenges are motivating students to engage in difficult tasks and to find meaning in them, or even to motivate students to attend school frequently. Our school is about 50% African American and 50% Hispanic with an increasing EL population: students who can speak very little English alongside groups who are increasingly comfortable with English. Especially among the ELs, but with everyone, there is often resistance to taking on challenging reading and writing tasks.
So, how do we make reading and writing, if not pure fun, then as interesting and as relevant to the lives of our students as possible? A learning style inventory at the beginning of last year revealed that a vast majority of our students were visual learners. This unit proposes teaching cinema as a way to frame interesting writing challenges that will build from narrative to analysis. After small writing assignments, we will conclude with students scripting and making their own documentary or fictional film to be shared with the class. Alternatively, students may revise all of their writing into a cohesive whole, in the form of a personal statement for instance. (Our English 10 ends the year with students drafting personal statements for college applications.) We’ll get to the content of students’ own creative responses and final project by watching documentaries, foreign films, shorter films, and animated shorts, and also reading flash fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. This unit aims to appeal to the imaginative potential of both aspiring college students and of students with vocational careers in mind, the latter of whom often don’t see the point of reading and writing at all, but may with the primer of a way to articulate their ideas about themselves and the world. For the college bound student, the unit presents a unique opportunity to diversify the kinds of writing they do in high school to prepare them for the diversity of writing tasks 4 year or community colleges will ask them to do. Although the unit does not ask students to complete a research paper, we will practice developing an annotated bibliography and introduce students to as many writing tools as possible. The development of written responses is simple: we watch a film, complete an activity and discuss, then write in response to the film in a given mode.
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