Jackie Kim Rationale While my identity exploration unit is based in the subject of English and Language Arts skills,

I will also be integrating various Social Studies themes throughout my curriculum. According to the School District of Philadelphias Scope and Sequence core curriculum, students in the eighth grade are expected to Demonstrate understanding of key ideas and details in literature by making inferences, drawing conclusions, and evaluating supporting details (E08.AK.1.1) and Demonstrate understanding of vocabulary and figurative language in literature (E08.A-V.4.1.1) during the 3rd quarter of the school year in English and Language Arts. My unit will reinforce these literacy skills by focusing on analyzing figurative language, making inferences and drawing conclusions about characters. In addition, my unit is grounded in National Curriculum Standards for Social Studies theme of Individual Development and Identity and will begin with an overview of the Harlem Renaissance. A major component of my literacy unit will incorporate portions of Bronx Masquerade, a novel by Nikki Grimes that tells the story of a high school English class in the Bronx. Each chapter is narrated by a different student and provides a glimpse into the lives and thoughts of eighteen different urban teenagers through the classs weekly open mike poetry sessions. Grimes uses different dialects to create distinct voices for each of the characters and incorporates slang, other languages, and pop culture references to create characteristics that are both realistic and relatable. I believe that my students will not only find her writing to be enjoyable and assessable, but they will also be able to relate to the issues of growing up and living in the inner city that the characters discuss as they share their thoughts, fears and dreams.

Jackie Kim While Bronx Masquerade may not be a considered a classic novel and use standard English, I anticipate that it will be much more interesting and relatable to my students and thereby help them to engage with the text and reinforce the literacy skills for this unit. In her article addressing the lack of the cultural and linguistic diversity in school literacy, Willis (1995) discusses the experiences of her nine-year-old son Jake as he struggles to affirm his identity as both an African American male and as a literacy learner. Fearing that his classmates will not be able to relate to his cultural norms or that his cultural experiences may not be appropriate subject material, Jake chooses to keep parts of his home and community life out of the classroom. Willis problematizes this separation and asserts that School-based literacy, in its varying forms, fails to acknowledge explicitly the richness of the cultural ways of knowing, forms of language other than standard English, and the interwoven relationship among power, language, and literacy that silences kids like Jake (39). As many of my own students are African Americans or immigrants from non-European countries and are coming from a high poverty neighborhood, they cannot necessarily relate to the Eurocentric middle class cultural norms that are often used to define school literacy. By choosing a book in which the narrators more closely reflect the experiences and cultures of my students, I hope to provide a platform through which my students can discuss issues that are relevant to their own lives. Furthermore, I plan to use the novel and other resources and activities to help the students work towards writing their poems about topics of their own choice. Although many of my students say that they believe education is important, it seems that many have difficulty seeing how what they do in school is directly relevant to their current lives. I hope to close this gap and show them that they can bring their experiences and

Jackie Kim culture into the classroom, which I believe will make it easier for them to hone the literacy skills as they can choose a topic that they are personally interested in. My decisions to use Bronx Masquerade and have the students write poetry that is centered around identity exploration stem from my own experiences in middle school. Growing up as both a child of immigrants and a minority in a predominately white school, I began to seriously think about issues of race and culture when I was in seventh grade. While I was aware of cultural differences and racism in elementary school, I remember starting to explore these issues in my own middle school English classes. Based on conversations I have had with my students or overheard in the classroom and their responses to certain journal assignments or stories, I believe my students are also contemplating these same issues of personal development and would like to provide them a safe space in which to discuss and explore these issues. Furthermore, middle school is a critical turning point for many students as it is a time when they begin to grow more independent and make decisions about who they want to be. In her book The Construction of Self, Harter (1999) writes that by middle to late childhood, children begin to make social comparisons for the purpose of self-evaluation and start to internalize the opinions and standards of others, which function as a self-guide for them. As the majority of my students are minorities, the negative stereotypes related to their racial or ethnic group may heavily influence their identity formation and have an adverse effect. In their research on the identity processes among racial and ethnic children in America, Spencer and Markstrom-Adams (1990) found these negative stereotypes about minorities to be counterproductive to acquiring a solid sense of self (303). In addition, the researchers argue that many traditional models of self or identity development:

Jackie Kim fail to link unique ecosystem or multileveled environmental experiences with lifecourse models (which integrate historical, sociocultural, biological and psychological components with behavioral response patterns), and as a consequence ignore the opportunity of furthering or broadening the knowledge extant on resilience and risk for youth whose normative experiences require ongoing adaptive strategies as a function of race, ethnicity, and/or color (304). By addressing the issue of identity development, I hope to not only broaden my students thinking about who they are and what defines their identity but also have candid discussions about the issues that they face in their everyday lives, the obstacles they face, and strategies for how to overcome them. In addition to Bronx Masquerade, I plan to use a variety of resources to explore the theme of identity development. I will be incorporating a variety of poems and will have the students bring in examples of figurative language from song lyrics, books, and movies that we will analyze together as a class. I also hope to incorporate spoken word performances through video clips, a guest performer, and the performances from the students themselves. Additionally, I will be searching through different movie clips, documentaries and biographies to find real world examples of the identity formation of other individuals and will refer back to previous texts the students have read and consider the characters from a different perspective. However, I hope to place the focus on the students themselves and will try to use a variety of formats for them explore their personal development such as writing poetry and prose, making inferences about and analyzing both fictional characters and real people, and creative forms of expressions such as creating self-portraits. I will encourage the students to reflect on their lives and consider how the people in their lives, the environment they live in and their past experiences have shaped who they are presently.

Jackie Kim Works Cited Harter, Susan. The Construction of Self: A Developmental Perspective. New York: The Guilford Press, 1999. Print. Spencer, M. B. & Markstrom-Adams, C. (1990). Identity processes among racial and ethnic minority children in America. Child Development, 61(2), 290-310. Willis, A. I. (1995). Reading the world of school literacy: Contextualizing the experience of a young African American male. Harvard Educational Review, 65, 30-49.