American Global Power from Empire to Superpower

Unit Objectives

My reading goal for this unit is to have students see the value of the non-fiction narrative (the stories we tell each other about our lives) as interesting works of literature and important sources of information. The writing goals are to teach students the values of writing down personal narrative stories and develop foundational skills and strategies to do so. With regards to the content of the narratives, my goals are for students to see immigration as a process that had a complex set of causes and began way before a person stepped into the U.S. I also want students to see that the U.S. has a lot more power than is always apparent. That power effects people all over the world, sometimes negatively. Finally, I want students to see immigration broadly, as an important phenomenon with multiple causes and effects. Yet, I want them to remember that large migration movements consist of individual humans that each have their own lives and stories. They are all unique but share a same humanity and hope for a better future.

I have found two sources for immigrant narratives. I recently attended a workshop about the South Asian American Digital Archive, SAADA.org. This archive has an initiative called the First Days Project. It contains true stories of immigrants’ first days in the U.S., in narrative or interview form. The initiative started just to chronicle the stories of immigrants from southeast Asia. Yet, part of the initiative is to allow readers to upload their own stories, so there are stories from immigrants from all over the world. There are sixteen stories of immigrants from the Philippines. There is also a page to upload stories. As part of the unit, students will read some of the narratives and interviews. Later in the unit, they will write a narrative about their own experience or interview someone who has immigrated to the U.S., and upload the story.⁵¹ I have also found a similar site called Made into America: Immigrant Stories Archive. It has eleven stories of people who have immigrated to the U.S. from the Philippines. This site also encourages readers to submit their own story to the site and has a “Tips for Getting Started” page. I can use this page to help me a create a graphic organizer to help students create questions. These questions will be used in their interviews or self-interviews to begin the information gathering process for their narratives. ⁵²

As students are reading immigrant stories from the Philippines, the class will need to explore the geography, history, and economics of the U.S.’s empire in general and the Philippines in particular. This will give students a better understanding of what led people to immigrate to the U.S. Therefore, I will need to find some combination of articles, websites, videos, podcasts, primary sources, maps, and images to help them a develop a basic historical, geographical, and economic understanding of the U.S.’s empire, especially in the Philippines, and the effect on immigration. One resource I have found is an episode of the The Experiment podcast called The Sisterhood. This podcast is a mixture of narrative and interview. It tells the story of how and why a group of nurses immigrated from the Philippines to the U.S. The hosts explain how the Philippines was a colony of the U.S. and how this led to nurses being trained in American medicine. The nurses being interviewed explain how Dictator Marcos led them to feel they had little options in the Philippines. It then talks about how the COVID 19 pandemic disproportionately affected the Filipino nursing community.⁵³ I may use parts of the audio and/or transcript for background knowledge in my unit. I may also use parts of the transcript as part of the lesson when students each read different immigrant narratives in small groups. I also may show clips from “The Crucible of the Empire: The Spanish-American War” in class to illustrate key information about the Spanish-American War and its consequences.⁵⁴ There is also a timeline on the film’s website that I could use as a source for background knowledge on the war and its effect on the Philippines.⁵⁵

I would also like to work in a cross curricular unit with the Social Studies teacher. Seventh grade Social Studies in Philadelphia focuses on world geography. It would be great if part of the exploration described in the above paragraph could take place in the social studies class, especially the study of the geography and culture of the Philippines, as geography and culture are primary focuses in the seventh-grade social studies curriculum. Also, the 7^th grade social studies teacher uses Socratic seminar as one of his teaching strategies. I could see him being eager to conduct a Socratic seminar with the students where they critically discuss the ideas of American empire and immigration using primary and secondary sources.

Students will then use the migrant narratives we read and discussed as mentor texts to write their own migrant narratives. These student narratives could be true first-hand accounts, based on interviews of family or friends, or based on passed down family stories. Using mentor texts is a technique used widely in middle school writing classes. I use mentor texts to help students develop character, setting and plot for their short story writing, but I have not used it for non-fiction texts. According to Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Children’s Literature, K-6, mentor texts become coaches and partners to bring joy to writing students. They are models to, “help students envision the kinds of writers they can become.”⁵⁶ Young writers can imitate mentor texts while continuing to find new ways in which to grow. Mentor texts must be high quality texts because they, “ignite the writer’s imagination and determination to create high-quality text that mirrors the mentor text in many ways.”⁵⁷ For teachers of writing, mentor texts help us move from developing individual pieces of writing, to developing the whole writer. 

The first crucial step is, of course, choosing the mentor text. The first criterion is for the teacher to connect with the text and love it. Next is to find examples of the author's craft that you want to highlight. Then think about how the text serves the students’ needs and connects with the curriculum. Key questions Dorfman and Cappelli suggest teachers ask themselves are, “Is this a book your students could relate to and/or read alone or with a partner?”, “Does it provide examples of the kinds of writing you want for your students?” and “Can it be revisited often for multiple lessons across traits of writing?”⁵⁸ Writing teachers should have a good balance of genres in their mentor texts and choose texts with cultural diversity and high engagement. When it comes down to it though, choosing mentor texts is always a personal decision.

Using true short immigration narratives of people who immigrated from the Philippines to the U.S. limits my choices when picking the best mentor texts. However, I can highlight specific parts of different narratives that are good models for specific narrative techniques such as imagery, descriptive language, character development, internal thinking, speeding up and slowing down, and satisfying conclusions. Specifically, the narrative “Letting Go of the Philippines”, on Madeintoamerica.org, models starting with a hook and creating imagery through descriptive language. “A Leap into the Unknown”, also on Madeintoamerica.org, models a seamless blend of dialogue, thinking, action, and description. This narrative also models creating suspense and ending with a purposeful conclusion.⁵⁹ Most of the narratives about the Philippines on Madeintoamerica.org are written by high school students from Palo Alto, CA about their relatives. I think this must have been part of the students’ coursework, possibly as part of the unit I found on Edutopia.com, which first led me to the Made into America database. The unit on Edutopia includes a lesson and graphic organizers to help students turn an interview into a narrative with a structure and storyline.⁶⁰ These two narratives are exemplary models of structure and storyline that should serve as great guides for my students.

The culmination of the unit will involve students sharing their writing with each other. This will lead to discussions, comparing and contrasting experiences, and drawing conclusions about the effect of global empire on immigration to the United States. I will also bind students’ final writing pieces into a book, as I do with all my students’ final writing pieces. As mentioned above, I also want students who want to and have permission from their parents, to upload their published pieces on the First Days Project of the SAADA archive⁶¹ and/or madeintoamerica.org.⁶²