4/8

I had such a hard time creating this unit plan and it was has been a very frustrating experience. This whole time I have based my decision to teach on wanting to empower students and challenge the ways in which they think and the moment I get the chance to do that, I am completely LOST!

            I was comforted by Bomer’s statement that “what produces an education is the minutes students spend engaged in meaningful activity with their teacher and other students, not some technically correct sequence of lessons”. However, I was confused about what those meaningful activities should be and how to make activities meaningful. I think this is also a little different because the unit is being constructed for a grade and I know it will be judged. I’m less open to risk taking because I have to consider my audience, and I’m afraid to create something that will seem ridiculous or does not reflect what we have learned thus far.

             Nonetheless, planning this unit made me think about the curriculum my friend and I created for the summer program a couple of years ago. That was much easier because there was somewhat of an agenda and the students were not very diverse. Now, I have to consider diversity and not simply throwing my ideas on the students and presenting them as absolute truths, because that’s essentially what we did.

            At first, without being completely sure, I focused the unit on social inequality in Austin. That ended up being very difficult because I couldn’t find enough resources or literature that addressed the issue in a manner that I thought would work for the classroom I had in mind. Then, I thought about making the unit more broad and just focus on social inequality. That was still a bit overwhelming because that topic is too broad and I struggled with how to plan for that in six weeks. I didn’t want to overlook anything and I felt like I needed more time to select the best books, articles and documentaries to support the topic.

            That whole process was very frustrating and I ended up completely letting the idea go. Now my unit is focused on identity. I found that focusing the unit on identity allows me to introduce social inequality to the students in a different way, a way that I can handle and support as a new teacher. Thinking about identity forces them to look at their social worlds, and what makes them who they are.

Overall, my goal for this unit is to foster a strong sense of communion within the classroom, the school, and the greater community because there is a lot of power in that, especially when challenging power. In my quest for resources to show the students, I stumbled across a documentary where bell hooks talks about promoting “communion” rather than “community”. She explained that in a community there is a great sense of togetherness but not a lot of conversation that focus on the differences within communities, and that often weakens the community; whereas communion has a strong focus on understanding, communication, and empathy. I thought that was very powerful and an idea I wanted my students to explore.

            At this point, I have decided on 3 books, 2 essays, and 3 documentaries:

The House on Mango Street-Sandra Cisneros

“The Negro and the Racial Mountain”-Langston Hughes

Black Boy- Richard Wright

“How it Feels to be Colored Me”- Zora Neale Hurston

Breath, Eyes, Memory- Edwidge Danticat

“Black is Black ain’t”- Marlon Riggs

“Afro-Latin Americans: A rising voice”- Miami Herald series

“When the Drum is Beating”- Whitney Dow