Project Proposal: Round Out the Reading List

Project Overview

The problem: Wit & Wisdom 7th grade ELA Unit 1 is very eurocentric. All of the authors are white. All of the characters are white. And all of the stories take place in medieval England. Yet, this does not reflect the cultural background of most of my students, who are largely Black and brown, mostly from hispanic cultures. 

This project will attempt to round out the reading list and reflect student reading identities. It will include a quick survey, done in the beginning of the term to get a baseline of which cultures need elevated representation. This survey will also include questions about how students best access and express knowledge. 

Then it will include bringing in texts that reflect this background. These will be integrated into the unit to highlight or contrast themes in the existent texts. 

Students should get an understanding of medieval England. And they need other texts to contrast this with. Texts they see themselves in, so they can explicitly contrast their cultural history with the course texts. 

Course Texts 

This project will lean on the ideas of Johnson, Armstrong & Wildman and Delpit. 

Johnson's work will ground this project as something to do with students in a classroom. It will give the direction of helping students access material through a rigorous and multicultural lens.

Armstrong and Wildman's work will help drive the discussions of how to explicitly contrast cultural norms through history. It will be the framework for analyzing who has power and who doesn't.

Also, I want to include the activity of having students describe their maternal grandmother. This may be good in tandem with the brief cultural survey. Starting this type of conversation early in the unit may set students up for more rigorous exploration as the unit moves on.

Lisa Delpit's work will help student look at the nuances of how power manifest in different cultures. They can examine these things explicitly in texts across cultures, then incorporate these elements in their POV narratives. For instance, this work could ground them in speech patterns across cultures. 

I can see this as a prompt during the Canterbury Tales: say the Pilgrims, on their travels, encounter a traveler from another culture going the other way. They stop and talk for a while. Take the POV of either the travel or one of the pilgrims. What are the assumptions they make? The judgements of how the other speaks? 

Format

Integrated into lesson plans for Unit 1. A thematic focus is hierarchy and class structure and the writing focus is alternate point of view creative writing. Student will be able to draw from alternative historical texts to write from perspectives not present in the eurocentric texts. They will be able to deepen their understanding of class and hierarchy if they are able to look at things from a cultural and racial lens.