Someone Like Me: Introducing Jr. High Students to Multicultural Narrators
My students need exposure to views different than their own, and reading multicultural titles like "I Am Malala" and "Shooting Kabul" will help them explore perspectives beyond their local sphere.
Our school serves students K-9, and I teach about 140 energetic, enthusiastic junior high students. Due to our small-sized junior high school, the students and teachers get to know each other very well over the three-year span that our students learn from seventh to ninth grade. It's a privilege to get to teach the same student for three years in a row and compare his/her growth as a reader and writer from the beginning of seventh grade to the end of ninth grade.
It's a uniquely rewarding and challenging experience teaching junior high students with the added responsibility of preparing them for high school.
My students will filter into four different high schools, so I catch them as they progress from the close-quartered small school (where they know everyone's name) to a variety of large, competitive high schools where they are one among 2,000 or more students.
My Project
Students in our school live in a non-diverse community with minority enrollment at 6-8%. The area also ranks low in household and religious diversity. It is invaluable to provide exposure to other narratives and perspectives to my students through their reading and language arts education, particularly because they lack opportunities to interact with people their age of different cultural and religious backgrounds.
Providing high-quality, award-winning books with rich, multicultural voices and narrators will help my homogeneous student population begin to explore and understand perspectives beyond their own.
The young narrators in "I Am Malala," "Shooting Kabul," "Ghost," and "American Born Chinese" are the same age as my students and share their interests, values, and concerns. I believe my students will connect with these high interest books and come to find similarities between the characters' lives and their own.
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