Classroom Activities
Visual Timeline
To kickstart the unit, students will collaborate with their Literature Circle groups to build a timeline of Asian American history. I will provide students with a list of essential laws and court cases, and students will research their dates and impacts. Then, students will select a visual symbol to pair with each moment on the timeline. For example, students might represent the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act with an image of China with an X over it. Students can refer to these timelines throughout the unit to help them understand how the U.S. immigration apparatus impacted the memoir authors and their families
One-Pagers
As students read each section of their memoirs, I want them to stop and reflect on what they have read and discussed. I do this through one-pagers, in which students use a combination of words, images, and symbols to depict key takeaways from their reading and conversation. I design one-pagers with boxes and direct students to fill in each box with words, images, and symbols that represent specific elements from their reading such as conflicts, overarching themes, and important relationships. My structured one-pagers prompt students to use quotations from the text that are relevant to the literary elements they are representing. At the conclusion of the unit, when students participate in the whole-class Socratic Seminar, they will be able to use their one-pagers as resources to aid their discussions. Students’ one-pagers, timelines, and Literature Circle work function as maps, tracing students’ journeys to a deeper understanding of the United States immigration system, how it came to be, and how it impacts real people.
In the Resources section below, I provide a list of the historical sources I used as well as citations for each middle school memoir. I have also included a list of memoirs that would be more appropriate for high school readers. These texts were all powerfully written and informative but include content that I felt was too mature for a middle school audience. They would be useful for teachers of older students, or for teachers themselves.
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