Classroom Activities
This unit will teach students about the necessity of antiracist Black Language and Ethnic Studies by asking them to examine their own ideas, identities, cultures, and histories. Ethnic Studies Pedagogy centers decolonizing the student’s consciousness, but students must first bring awareness to how their minds have been colonized.
Part one - Remembering Our Stories
This section is meant to introduce students to Antiracist Black Language and Ethnic Studies pedagogies by guiding them through writing exercises that use their background knowledge related to their identity: culture/race, history, and language. We’ll discuss how much students feel that they know about their cultural background and history and how much they feel that their culture and history is taught in school. Typically, student responses overwhelmingly demonstrate the need to strengthen Ethnic Studies and expand on teaching in a culturally relevant manner so that students see themselves reflected in what they are learning. This involves engaging with students in critical analysis of and dismantling the ways in which white supremacy shows up in schooling.
Activity One: Journal Ritual (A)
We will begin each class with our journal ritual where I will provide them with guided prompts and other creative exercises borrowed from my own high school creative writing teacher and mentor, Cathy Hailey, and The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom.74 Students may struggle at first with exploring their writer’s voice. They may try to write in a formula or based on a previous teacher’s expectations, so it may be useful to ask them about the kind of writing that they enjoy or the genres they tend to gravitate toward. Then, based on their responses, ask them to think about the reasons they enjoy these certain books, stories, music, poems, or any multi-media. Chavez refers to this as a family tree of influences.75 These reflections should help them compose meaningful goals that they want to set with regard to their writing. Students will receive a variety of prompts related to identity as well as opportunities to freewrite about topics on their mind. I will explain to them that they need to select one journal entry on a weekly basis to workshop with their group mates. We will use the journal for the steps toward completing the family interview project.
Activity One (B): Language Analysis
Before beginning workshops, we will engage in a series of antiracist Black Language activities such as the “Attitudinal Assessment” between features of Black Language and features of White Mainstream English; Baker-Bell asks students to:
“(1) read two language samples, (2) draw an image, cartoon, or character that reflect each language sample, and (3) write a paragraph that expressed their thoughts about both languages and the speakers of those languages.”76
It’s crucial to engage in a class discussion where students get to share their opinions, so there should be some norms established about discussions to ensure students feel heard and that there’s respectful dialogue. This exercise illuminates Anti-Black Linguistic Racism that students may have learned and internalized. Later, I will show a variety of examples that employ Black Language for students to analyze the effects and show how this is a language in its own right and not an informal slang or inferior to Mainstream White English. With the results, writing exercises and workshops moving forward should interrogate any Anti-Black Linguistic Racism that may occur, either from the teacher or the students, in attempts to unlearn anti-blackness and undo how white supremacy shows up in our language.
Activity Two (A): Pair Free Writes with Text Analysis
Whenever there’s a text analysis, teachers should be wary of pitfalls that can accompany the cycle of reading a text to then imitate it. Chavez notes, “Wielding absolute authority, traditional workshop leaders select and assign white authors for student study (save for the occasional Baldwin, of course). Read this text, absorb it - the topic, structure, style, voice - and then copy it. Prove your literacy by climbing inside the master’s mouth and parroting whiteness.”77 To combat this, she cites the use of freewriting in Peter Elbow’s Writing with Power.78 Prior to reading any text, I ask students to write about the topics which the text will explore. I do not put many parameters around this other than a time limit, and then I go around the room to check their journal entry, although I will always respect it if a student doesn’t want me to fully read their writing and just check it for completion.
These freewrites engage their background knowledge, and you can also do this through dialogue. Dialogue can be done in a variety of ways that accommodate comfort levels such as with partners, small groups, and then the whole class. It is crucial for texts to be culturally relevant as this will help to increase engagement. Typically, I set up students with the craft elements that they should analyze the text for, but instead, I want to try to have them tell me about the kind of craft elements that they find impactful depending on the genre. We will refer to this co-created list of craft elements, such as “voice, imagery, characterization, and arrangement,”79 when analyzing the texts and how each one contributes to the writing. Then, students can circle back to their freewrites, read them, and point out any craft elements that they’re using in their writing or where they would like to experiment with more craft elements.
Activity Two (B) Family Interview
To guide students through the Family Interview Oral History/Storytelling project, I will rely heavily on the field guide provided in The Power of the Story and Riechel’s “Our Oral History Narrative Project”.80 The Power of the Story81 has a thorough timeline, planning sheet, and checklist that I will utilize to support students in understanding and setting goals for their project as well as completing the steps.
Part two - Retelling Oral Stories
Activity Three (A): Workshop
Students will receive notice of workshop days and have an opportunity prior to their workshop to select a piece of writing from their journal. There are a couple steps toward revision that I would like students to take prior to their workshop. First, students need to read their chosen piece aloud. Verlyn Klinkenborg says, “Try reading your work aloud. / The ear is much smarter than the eye, / If only because it’s also slower / And because the eyes can’t see rhythm or hear unwanted / repetition.”82 I will ask my students to read their work aloud to themselves or to a partner. There should be flexibility to accommodate students’ comfort levels especially at the start of the practice or the beginning of a new class full of unfamiliar faces. As students are reading aloud, I will ask them to notice any opportunities to utilize writing elements, fix words or sentences, add more or rearrange what they have. Often, I find that students struggle to revise their writing, so it’s important to remind students that perfection is not the goal. They can decide their personal writing goals, but I want them to keep in mind that my goal for them is to find their writing voice and deepen their writing practice.
On the following day, I will guide students through a discussion on workshopping, revising, peer-editing, and sharing writing with each other. This is a very vulnerable practice. Students may be coming in with negative experiences around writing. Previous teachers may have discouraged them from pursuing writing in a way that is authentic to them. I will share my own personal experiences around having my writing workshopped, and I encourage teachers to reflect on their experiences around sharing their writing and how these experiences may be intentionally or unintentionally informing decisions around how to facilitate workshops. As teachers of writing, we need to be in a cycle of engaging in self-reflection, receiving student feedback, and reassessing our teaching practices to ensure that we are creating an anti-racist, anti-oppressive space that does not perpetuate marginalization and actively works to be inclusive of all our students as full human beings. I want students to brainstorm reasons for workshopping and revising our writing. These student-generated reasons should be visible somewhere in the classroom to return to whenever workshops happen.
The workshop model will center around celebrating aspects of the writing that are working in the writing piece. Chavez refers to this as a “pop” and goes on to explain it as “a particular moment of heightened energy or innovation - a line, a rhyme, an image - in celebration of what was working in the piece.”83 These pops will help students recognize strengths in their writing as well as their peers’ writing. Readwritethink84 has excellent handouts that can help reinforce a pop practice that I will utilize and review with students. I will also think of ways to provide extrinsic motivation for students to participate in their workshops and collectively create norms around providing feedback with students. After workshops are done, I will collect feedback on how workshops went and review the feedback with the class in an anonymous manner that protects student privacy while also ensuring that feedback is meaningfully integrated into our future workshop sessions.
Activity Three (B): Drafting a Narrative
Before writing a narrative of their interview, students will need to listen to the recording in its entirety. They will take notes while listening to their recordings which can be between 15 to 30 minutes for the first interview. Their notes should include time stamps when they noticed that the interview response sounded interesting, more detailed, or impactful and write down the words verbatim exactly as they said it. I will demonstrate an example by using my interview with my grandmother. They should transcribe between 2-4 sections of their interview that can contribute to a compelling story. Once they have transcribed these sections, they can share them with a partner, the person they interviewed, myself, or a different teacher.
Their narratives will take different forms, but they must always keep in mind that the narrative should reflect and honor the voice of the person they interviewed. We can refer back to Rigoberta Menchú’s autobiography and the Translator’s Note as well as the introduction and how both contributors strived to retell her story as accurately and authentically as she shared it.
Activity Three (B): One-on-One Teacher-Student Conferences
Conferences with students can be challenging to find the time to complete, but I try my best to meet with students individually throughout the semester that they have my class. Find a notetaking method that works well for you to track your conferences. I like to use a spreadsheet and duplicate the content that I usually review with each student, including: grade, life goal, writing goal, what are your strengths, what are your growths, revision feedback, and next steps.
For my conferences, I will be implementing more opportunities for students to collaborate with me on their conferences. Typically, conferences vary depending on the student’s personality and desire to engage in a one-on-one conversation with their teacher, and I am often left wondering the value of the conferences both for the student’s growth and my data collection and growth as a teacher. Prior to conferences, I will have my students complete responses for questions to prepare that I am borrowing from Chavez:
* “What does your draft need right now? Be specific. Craft an agenda of your three most pressing writing needs in order of urgency to help guide the conversation.
* How can your teacher contribute to your writing needs? Identify a short list of explicit actions, making it easy for your teacher to contribute
* What do you need right now? Is there anything you need me to know such as personal issues or issues inside/outside of this class?”85
These questions are meant to guide students in reflecting on and stating their needs rather than having a teacher inundate them with an overwhelming amount of feedback that may be difficult or discouraging to parse through or having a teacher not take the student’s needs into consideration.
Part three - Reclaiming Our Stories
Activity Four: Finalize Narrative and Display Based on Family Interview
After students have been workshopped and have met with me for their conference, students will finalize their narratives. Again, this narrative is an overarching term as their narratives can be written stories, a video, a song, a poem, or another creative form. It is important to be checking in frequently to ensure that students are receiving the support they need to complete their project which includes communication with their caregivers.
Their narrative will be shared at our Celebrating Our Stories: A Decolonized Multicultural Fair (I’m sure the students will create a more creative title than I have). Students can decide how they would like to display their narratives, whether through performing it, a trifold stand with pictures accompanying the text, or another format that suits their project.
Activity five: Celebrating Our Stories
Students will know from the beginning of the unit that we will end the unit with a celebration. In order to combat systemic oppression against our students in schools that strip them of their humanity, autonomy, agency, and power, we must take steps to create systemic change with our students. They must be completely involved in the process of organizing the celebration event. Students will have opportunities to receive leadership and team-based roles that will be crucial to event planning such as event coordinators, a media and communications team, an outreach team, a fundraising committee, a planning council that will also include administrators, teachers, and community members, a decorations and creativity committee, as well as any other roles that may arise during our planning stages. Students must be able to feel a sense of agency throughout organizing this event as this will demonstrate their capacity to collectively make change in school and in society.
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