My students come from all neighborhoods of our city, and their backgrounds range a great deal with regard to race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and life experience.
Our school encourages students to become advocates in their own learning, and they are given a great deal of choice in the direction of their studies.
They are taught to imagine, innovate, inquire, and investigate. When our students graduate, they are prepared to attend college and the world beyond, equipped with 21st-century critical thinking skills and technological savvy.
My Project
With a classroom set of copies of Tommy Orange's masterful debut novel, my students will come to understand that the Native American tribes–their cultures, traditions, and identities–are too important and integral to the history of this nation to be overlooked or dismissed. Orange allows his readers to understand that there is no single narrative to any community's experiences, no matter how foreign or "other" that community might seem to an outsider.
I am always asking my students to reach beyond their own familiar world to better understand the perspectives of other lives lived, and I want to continue that work with Orange's novel.
My students will read a cacophony of voices in my classroom, with this novel being placed alongside those of Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Tony Kushner, Gene Luen Yang, and many others as I attempt to complicate narrower notions of what it means to be an American.
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