Home, Displacement and Vulnerability: Survival and Courage in Alan Gratz’s Refugee
Refugee by Alan Gratz focuses on the lives of three young kids who are forced to leave their home countries and find refuge elsewhere. Josef, a twelve-year-old boy living in Nazi Germany, struggles to become the head of household after his father is taken to a concentration camp. Isabel, a young girl from Cuba in the 1990s, tries to mend the relationship between her family members as they head to Florida with her pregnant mother on a homemade raft. And Mahmoud, a young boy from Syria in 2015, seeks refuge in countries where he and his family are not welcomed. In this unit, students will engage in discussions about migration and its policies, conduct research on immigrant and refugee populations in their communities, and consider the many reasons that cause people to migrate. Furthermore, students will engage in narrative writing from the perspective of characters in the novel and analyze what their stories help us learn about the experiences of immigrants and refugees.
Essential Questions / Big Idea for the unit:
Why do people migrate? How does immigration impact a person’s life? What risks are people willing to take to live a better life?
This historical novel was very different from all the texts my students had engaged with previously. I was certain that our work in previous units had prepared students to boost their reading and writing skills as well as their confidence. Designing this unit was difficult because the text posed many challenges for the large population of ELL students in my class. There were no translations of the text available, and it was written from the perspective of three different characters making reading comprehension a lot harder. I spent the beginning of this unit reading out loud with students and discussing the novel to ensure comprehension. I found it hard to include creative learning activities for this unit because I focused on making sure students understood the text more than anything else.
I quickly noticed the interest of my students dwindle in this unit. They were finding it hard to spend every last class of the day reading and discussing a text that was already difficult to understand. Eventually, I was able to get feedback from students on how to make this unit more creative. I integrated secondary texts, documentaries, and other visuals to help students understand what we were reading and why it was important. I believe that what made students enjoy this unit most were the connections it had to their own community. Students learned about refugee and immigrant populations around the world, in the city of Worcester, and one student even shared his personal experience as a refugee with the class.
