Introduction / Rationale
Three years ago, my district adopted a new curriculum for our middle schools. One of the major selling points of this curriculum was that it would provide students with opportunities to access diverse texts from diverse authors, which would in turn positively affect student performance on standardized tests. The idea was that our state test asks students to read, analyze, and write texts of historical and scientific nonfiction, so students should have a focus on that in their Language Arts classes throughout the year. An added bonus, theoretically, was that having an array of different texts would increase student engagement compared to whole-novel study or consistent examination of short stories. However, over the last three years, I have witnessed my students engage most deeply and understand most thoroughly literary texts (fiction and nonfiction) that tell stories about people and characters authentically dealing with conflicts the way that they do in real life.
The reality of my and my students’ situation is that the structure of our curriculum, what I am required to teach and the assessments they are required to take, is not going to completely change overnight. However, when we do get opportunities to study the stories my students find most exciting, I try to capitalize on this learning time. These stories allow my students to see either themselves reflected, or they allow the students to see into an experience that is totally different from their own – exemplifying Emily Style’s notion of curriculum acting as both a window and a mirror, which I will discuss further later on in this unit.1 When we study these texts, my students are able to bring their own background knowledge to make profound self-to-text, text-to-text, and world-to-text connections that demonstrate a high level of comprehension and critical thinking, which is what I dream of as a teacher of reading and writing. They are, without necessarily knowing the terminology, practicing their own critical literacy.
My students’ interactions with these texts are often deeply critical, as learners challenge the life-likeness of the characters’ actions, or as they challenge their own ideas about how they might respond in a certain conflict. They do a great deal of perspective-taking, and they ask “why” and “what about” all the time, as adolescents are wont to do. This critical reading and connection-making has inspired me to develop my new curriculum unit. In this unit, I plan to support students in learning about Black creators who have similarly taken a critical eye to the texts they engage with. We will read and analyze works from Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Walker, Ken Harper, and others, to identify the ways that their writing reflects their own critical reading of the canon that came before.
The main goal of my curriculum unit is for students to build an understanding of the ways in which writers pull inspiration from deficits that they find in the “windows and mirrors” they are presented with. For example, taking a close look at the inspirational lineage between Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker, both feminists in their own right, but the former in possession of a significant blind spot in her writings–Black women. In this unit, we will explore how Walker and several other Black creatives are able to critically read the works that they encounter (and frequently appreciate, and sometimes love!) that do not consider Black readers and viewers, and then re-create the texts in a way that it does represent a broader, Black audience.
Throughout this unit, students will read and compare works from Black authors and the works they have pulled inspiration from throughout history. Students will then conduct research on the ways that Black creatives have adapted and rewritten texts to better represent themselves. Finally, students will create and present a product to demonstrate their research findings. Additionally, though this will certainly be less objectively measurable, my goal for this unit is to remind students that despite the strictures in life on what we must do, there are also avenues by which we can pursue what is truly important to us, just as the authors we will study have done.
Demographics
I teach Seventh Grade English Language Arts at P.S. duPont Middle School in Wilmington, Delaware. Within our school building are multiple educational programs, including the Brumskill Early Childhood Assistance Program, the BSD Gifted Program, and Special Programs (which encompasses the Brandywine Autism Program and the Independent Learning Program), in addition to the middle school students (sixth, seventh, and eighth graders) I teach. Students attending P.S. live in many neighborhoods in both the city of Wilmington and surrounding suburbs. According to the Delaware Report Card website, which the Department of Education uses to share demographic and proficiency data about schools in the state, P.S.’s 2024 student population is 50.33% African American, and 27.37% of students are White, with the remaining 22.3% of students identifying as either Hispanic / Latino, Asian American, Multiracial, or Hawaiian / Pacific Islander. We are a Title I school, with 30.17% of students identified as Low-Income, and 2.67% identified as Homeless. We also serve students with disabilities, who make up 21.76% of our population, and English Learners, who make up 4.27% of our population.2
I include this abundance of demographic information to paint a clear picture of what my classroom looks like. I do not teach in the Gifted Program, nor do I teach in the preschool we share our building with, but I do teach students from every other group that I mentioned above. This means that I and my co-teachers are tasked with ensuring that the curriculum that we get from a large textbook company works for students who may be in their first year of English Language Development classes, or those with Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) who may have learning disabilities that affect their performance in Language Arts classes. This also means that many of my students are not fully represented in the texts in our curriculum (or for some, not represented at all).
In my classroom, students read informational, argumentative, poetic, and literary texts, with what I perceive to be an emphasis on historical and scientific articles. Students analyze and annotate these texts toward the goal of learning how to identify central ideas and themes, infer information or character motivations, compare authors’ purposes, and otherwise achieve the objectives set forth in the Common Core State Standards. In class, students complete both multiple choice tests and writing assignments in order for me to assess their understanding of our units. Students also participate in the NWEA MAP interim assessment, which measures their growth in reading and math over the course of the year. At the end of the year, students participate in the Smarter Balanced assessment, which measures grade-level proficiency in reading and math. In 2023, the end of year assessment for reading showed the following results: 16% of students scored “Exceeds,” 20% of students scored “Meets,” 18% of students scored “Below,” and 46% of students scored “Well Below” the proficiency level.3
Because I am aware of how many students do not meet the proficiency level in reading based on our end of year assessment, I prioritize critical reading and writing in my classroom. I hold students to a high expectation, and provide the necessary support for them to meet that expectation. Students practice independent reading, annotating, and writing to build the skills necessary for them to perform well on assessments, but also which they will need throughout their lives. My new curriculum unit re-emphasizes my commitment to these high academic standards, as well as creates more opportunities for my students to truly see themselves represented in what they read and write.
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