Classroom
Resources:
Extended
Lesson Treatments
The following lessons
include more detailed discussion of the lesson itself, as well as examples
of student work and teacher reflections on the lesson. For more lessons
like these, purchase our new publication, Writing Our Communities.
- Anecdotes
to Artifacts:
This pre-reading activity for When Clay Sings encourages analytical
thinking and appreciation for diversity. This method of inquiry transforms
students’ interpretive abilities, challenging them to think more broadly
about the meaning of a text. It also encourages both individual and
group work through an interdisciplinary approach.
- Cityscapes:
Architecture as Artifact:This
activity is based on the premise that mathematics can be used across
the curricula. Students are encouraged to write and to implement the
notion of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) that
math must incorporate “real-world” applications in order to be relevant
to students. Through an examination of community artifacts and local
architecture, students are challenged to use higher-level thinking skills
in composition and mathematics.
- Coming
to America:
In this activity students interview an immigrant who has lived in the
country of origin long enough to have mastered the language and have
distinct memories of that land and its culture.
Students then write an article based on the interview that
presents both the distinctive voice and the personality of the interviewee
by using carefully chosen information situated in its appropriate historical
and cultural context.
- Composing
Communities in College: This
course at Kennesaw State University, grounded in the writing process,
emphasizes primary and secondary research activities. Drawing from
an emphasis on authentic research, which includes site visits, interviews,
and oral histories, this essay assignment begins with one of these primary
research activities. The students adapt the assignment to their particular
interests and backgrounds and examine evidence of existing or ignored
communities in their area through an actual observation or an interview.
This essay assignment nudges students to discover the complex historical
forces that create and sustain communities around them.
- Critical
Reading, Imaginative Writing, and the Me Montage: This
assignment asks students to exercise critical reading skills to a variety
of texts and results in applying those skills to their own lives. Both
elementary school and high school adaptations are explored.
- The
Great Gatsby and Community Research: This
research unit takes a classic and connects it to a local community.
Library visits, assignments to do research outside of class, committee
planning meetings and literary “fishbowls” will serve as preludes to
the culminating activities: a literary essay, and a committee presentation
on the group's background research and their selected neighborhood.
- Imag(in)ing
Our History: This activity offers students a creative opportunity
to reflect upon their own reaction to this tragedy as they craft a letter
to their future grandchildren.
- Picturing
Family History:
Students interview their parents about when they met, dated, and married.
Interviews culminate in a piece of original poetry.
- Presenting
Humanities Research as a Journalistic Feature:
This lesson showcases the results and details the process of a collaborative
research project that culminated in a spotlighted feature in the school
newspaper.
- Re-covering
Imperial History: This
lesson seeks to involve a diverse student population in an intellectual
and effective way with the incredibly rich and complex forces that led
to the imperialism of the nineteenth century.
Students
first read Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins’s children’s book My
Place and then create their own My Place book with the assigned
countries of China and Japan.
- Recovering
Underexamined Histories: This exercise is a short piece
of response-writing to Diane Glancy’s Pushing the Bear,
whose central topic is the Cherokee Removal. Students respond online
to a discussion board about a text that questions the lessons of the
Removal in the nineteenth century.
- A
Reporter's Recovery of Place:
A journalism assignment for one student illustrates the possiblities
of authentic research and student writing.
- Searching
for Oklahoma: This activity allows students to develop a clearer
picture of their home state through a variety of methods. This activity
could be adapted to any state with the substitution of appropriate texts.
-
September 12 Journal Writing:
After
viewing hours of television coverage of the September 11 attack on America
, this teacher had to gather herself to enter her classroom the next
day. Life in had to continue. This journal writing activity
could be adapted to help ease the transition from any difficult event,
local or national, and to make the classroom experience relevant to
students’ lives.
- Weaving
Heritage Through the Strands of Mountain Windsong: A teacher's
creative planning transforms having too few copies of the novel Mountain
Windsong into an informative and enlightening exercise in critical
reading.
- What
a Garden Can Teach Us:
An idea as unpretentious as planting a garden can inspire an idea as
significant as creating a community. In this activity students respond
to Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman (or another short story or novel
in which community building is a strong theme) with illustrations and
ideas for strengthening their own communities.
- Where
I'm From:
Personal and Cherokee Voices: This activity encourages students to consider
both their personal community and the community of those who came before
them through research and poetry.
- Writing
Places:
This assignment fuses creative writing, interviewing and researching
skills for high school students. Reading poems of place by students
and published writers begins the brainstorming process that leads to
developing questions, image lists, and poem drafts. The blending of
the classroom and local community is woven into final drafts of each
student’s poetry of place.
- Writing
to Focus Reading and to Imagine Researching:
This lesson was designed to help us think about how to introduce others,
unfamiliar with our program, to KCAC. We used a particular article
from a local newspaper as a springboard for introducing program concepts,
research approaches, and writing strategies.
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