Background And Rationale
Student Demographics
I teach seventh- and eighth-grade English/Language Arts at P.S. duPont Middle School, a public school in Wilmington, Delaware’s Brandywine School District serving students in grades six through eight. P.S. houses the district’s middle school Gifted Services. As one of the building’s two certified Gifted ELA teachers, I teach all the eighth graders and about half of the seventh graders who receive Gifted Services. According to the Delaware Department of Education, in 2025, students who received Gifted Services made up about one-third of the school’s 657 enrollment students. 28% of students at P.S. were identified as low income, and 19.94% received special education services, including some of my students. In the 2025-2026 school year, I taught 122 students, with 82 in my eighth-grade sections and 40 in my seventh-grade sections. Based on the Delaware Department of Education’s data and identity categories, 65.5% of my students were White, 10.6% were African American, and 23.8% were Asian American including students of Chinese, Korean, Indian, and Bengali descent.[2] Because Asian American students make up a sizeable proportion of my classes, I wanted to learn more about Asian American history to ensure that my Asian American students see their and their families’ stories represented accurately and respectfully in the curriculum.
This unit builds on my seventh-grade students’ prior knowledge. They were introduced to Chinese immigration in sixth grade through reading the novel Dragonwings by Chinese American author Laurence Yep. To expand their understanding of the development of the United States immigration apparatus, I want students to explore the experiences of other immigrant groups. Through a narrative writing unit which uses the Literature Circle format to organize reading and discussion, this unit empowers students to forge personal connections to texts and take responsibility for their learning.
Literature Circles
Literature Circles lend themselves to immigration narratives because there are so many different stories to tell. They vary depending on the individual’s age, country of origin, and time. In the Teaching Strategies section, I describe Literature Circles in more depth, but a primer on the structure and roles is helpful because they inform the organization of the Content Objectives.
In this unit, I provide students with a list of memoirs authored by first generation immigrants and their 1.5 or second-generation children and form small groups based on students’ book preferences. Ideally, each group reads a different memoir. Within groups, members rotate through four to five roles guiding their responses to the text in preparation for in-class discussions. The roles are Context Director, Analyst, Discussion Facilitator, and Illustrator and/or Poet. The Context Director selects and researches a topic mentioned in the reading which the group needs more information to understand. The Analyst examines the author’s style, calling out elements like figurative language, imagery, and text structure. The Discussion Facilitator creates text-based higher-order thinking questions, prepares an answer, and records their group’s responses. The Illustrator represents an important scene or concept in the reading through visual art, while the Poet does the same through poetry.
In the Content Objectives section, I organize the content for each memoir around these roles. For educators, I also highlight any content in the books they might want to consider before assigning books to student groups. Before diving into the memoirs, students need a grounding in the history of the United States immigration system. I plan to introduce this topic through readings and discussions about the history of Asian immigration to the U.S. and government’s attempts to control it. I will explain this in more depth in the Classroom Activities section.
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