My students come from diverse backgrounds. They are caring and eager to learn new things. They are funny and talkative, serious and quiet. They play sports, speak multiple languages, and perform on stages of all kinds. They are community activists and inspiring artists.
My students listen to varying perspectives and practice empathy while investigating the world.
My students are the proud generals that will graduate and move on to be active and engaged citizens. I feel honored and lucky to teach these students.
My Project
African-American Literature is a wonderfully expansive canon that cannot all be covered through one book. Literature Circles provides students the opportunity to concentrate their studies on their specific interests and work in small groups that share this common interest.
We must find ourselves in literature: in texts that are mirrors that reflect our identities and through windows that provide an opportunity to see a lived experience that is not like our own; in this way, we anchor ourselves in our own identities and build empathy for others.
These books, along with Octavia Butler's Kindred, August Wilson's Fences, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Richard Wright's Black Boy, and Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which are already in our library, will be the platform from which students will delve deeply. Grouped up by interest, students will read and discuss and research and read some more, and then go on to teach their classmates about their specific subject area. Through these Lit Circles our classroom community will be both a learner and a teacher.
The subject areas we will cover includes: Oral Traditions: Speeches & Sermons; Oral Traditions: Poetry & Music; Biracial Identities; Afro-Futurism; Black Feminism; Black Resistance & Revolution; Harlem Renaissance; Drama: Playwrights, Directors, & Actors; Memoir & Autobiography; and Coming of Age: Contemporary Young Adult Fiction.
Students' explorations will be grounded in four essential questions: 1.Does our contemporary society need or not need the designation of African-American Literature (the canon)? 2. What future society does your section of the canon envision and what is the road map to this future? 3. What historical contexts or inspirations does your section of the canon build upon? 4. Where do you see or fail to see these visions in action today?
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