Context: I created a Unit Plan on reading and writing poetry as a way of integrating different reading comprehension and descriptive writing skills that second graders had been learning and developing during my student teaching experience. In this unit, students read and listened to rhyming and non-rhyming poetry written by Shel Silverstein and other multicultural authors, illustrated and discussed visual images they created while reading poetry, made inferences while reading poetry, used literary devices such as simile and onomatopoeia to write poetry, and published two poems on student-selected topics that included vivid, descriptive language and imagery. Artifacts include the Poetry Unit Plan, a lesson plan on revising poetry, and examples of student work throughout the writing process: a rough draft, an interactive rubric used during revision, and a final draft of a poem on the topic "Where I'm From."
TEP Goals and Targets:
1C Planning
In planning for this unit, I read poetry written by a variety of authors, including Shel Silverstein, Jack Prelutsky, Eloise Greenfield, Langston Hughes, Douglas Florian, and Eve Merriam, and selected poems that would engage students and provide a model for the targeted objectives I wanted students to achieve. I planned mini-lessons to introduce students to specific literary devices such as simile and onomatopoeia so that they would have multiple experiences identifying and using similes in a variety of contexts. I integrated our study of poetry with the reading curriculum, and used poetry as a vehicle for practicing reading comprehension strategies such as visualizing and making inferences. Finally, and most importantly, I used principles of pyramid planning to identify objectives that ALL students could successfully achieve and planned instructional scaffolds to enable students to meet these objectives.
2D Adapting for Diversity
In this Poetry unit, students read and listened to poetry written by multicultural authors and reflected on the diversity of voices and images present in the texts. Students' individual cultural and linguistic backgrounds were the central topic of their own writing, and the culminating "The Important Thing" and "Where I'm From" writing projects encouraged students to write about the people, places, and things that were culturally important and meaningful to them by including details about different languages, family traditions, and beliefs. In addition to the culturally inclusive curriculum I created, I considered ways to make appropriate adaptations for diverse learning styles and abilities, including ELL students, in reading and writing. Because I implemented specific accommodations or modifications for students, I maintained an inclusive classroom that attended to meeting each student's diverse learning needs and abilities.
Reflection:
Invitation
If you are a dreamer, come in.
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer . . .
If you're a pretender, come sit by my fire,
For we have some flax golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!
~By Shel Silverstein
Some of my favorite children's authors - Shel Silverstein, Mem Fox, and Eve Bunting, to name a few - write about important messages of acceptance, diversity, and belonging. The texts that teachers bring into the classroom to share with students can spark meaningful discussions about race and equality, and such texts begin to carve out an approach to teaching that lives and breathes these values of acceptance, diversity, and belonging. The words of Shel Silverstein in his poem "Invitation" speak to me as an educator, and remind me of the importance of inviting all students to come in to my classroom as they are, whoever they are, and beginning the work of teaching each child.
In the second grade classroom in which I completed my student teaching, twenty-one out of twenty-two students came from military families and had one or more parents who served in the U.S. Navy. These students had moved around several times during their lives and had lived in different places as far away as Guam and Sicily. Therefore, the concept of "Where I'm From" carried a lot of weight and held significant meaning for each student. I adapted this lesson from a fellow colleague in the Teacher Education Program, and decided to begin the lesson by asking students the following question: "If someone asks you where you are from, what do you say?" Some students replied that they were from Washington, one replied that he was from Texas, and others wrestled with the question with responses such as, "Well, I was born in Aiea, Hawaii, and my mom says it's the only city with all vowels in its name. But my grandparents live in South Dakota and we go there a lot to visit." After eliciting many different student responses, I said, "Now that you've told me where you're from, I want you to show me where you're from."
As I taught second graders to write about their individual cultures and backgrounds to paint a picture in words on the topic of "where I'm from," the meaning of culture expanded and broadened for me, and I learned from their individual voices that culture means more than race, ethnicity, or country of origin. When Gloria Ladson-Billings describes culturally relevant teaching practices for teachers of African-American students, she argues that such teachers see themselves as part of the community, believe that all students can succeed, help students make connections between their community, national, and global identities, see teaching as “digging knowledge out” of students, demonstrate a connectedness with each of their students, encourage a community of learners by encouraging students to learn collaboratively, and expect students to teach and take responsibility for each other. (Ladson-Billings, 1994) While this may be true for teachers of African-American students, these teaching practices are effective for ALL students and should be embraced as such. A view of multicultural education that holds race as its primary indicator of what it means to be “multicultural” severely limits the ways in which teachers see and understand their students.
There is no single, uniform way of being African-American, or European-American, or Latino, or Vietnamese. While it is essential for teachers to see students’ racial and ethnic differences, these differences are just one dimension of culture, and to inextricably link multicultural education with race limits the perspective that every person has a rich and meaningful culture. Culture can be defined by one's values, one's family, one's experiences, and one's ideas. The individual culture that is at the heart of every human being is the culture that teachers must yearn to teach, not simply the culture of race.
In his book We Can't Teach What We Don't Know: White Teachers, Multiracial Schools, Gary Howard defines the function of culture as "to provide a context, a circle of meaning, and a sense of relationship to all of life." (Howard, 1999) As my second graders embarked on answering the question "Where am I from?" through their poetry, I thought, brainstormed, wrote, and re-wrote alongside of them about the people, traditions, sounds, foods, events, and places that are important to me. As a result, I arrived at a more vivid sense of my own culture, not as a European-American, not as a female, and not as a graduate student, but as a person, as a human being. By writing about and giving voice to myself, I felt a stronger sense of my own identity as a person, and my finished product was a representation of that identity that I was proud of. Teachers who create experiences for students to express their culture and identity enable students to be proud and confident in who they are as people, and to give voice to themselves as these second graders did in the following ways:
"I am from California that is as warm as a steamy hot banana pepper."
"I am from God's wonderful hand . . ."
"I am from foolish Yee-Haw! Texas."
"I'm from huge black bears and where fresh berries grow. I am from night flying bats invading the sky."
"I am from Florida, where the dolphins swim and the cockroaches crawl."
"I am from delicious big breakfasts with my fantastic as a fox Grampa."
"I am from ice cold Connecticut, burning hot palm trees that go shoosh! in the warm, cool breeze of Hawaii, and peaceful nights in North Carolina."
"I am from all of us."
References
Howard, Gary. (1999). We Can't Teach What We Don't Know: White Teachers, Multiracial Schools. New York: Teachers College Press.
Ladson-Billings, Gloria. (1994). The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African-American Children. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
