Learning Activity 1- Understanding Common Myths About Adolescence
The unit started out with an excerpt from Nancy Lesko’s book, Act Your Age. In the excerpt, she outlines 4 common characterizations assigned to adolescents: Adolescence is signified by age, adolescents are controlled by raging hormones, adolescents are peer-oriented, and adolescents slowly come of age into adulthood. The reading was very high level, and I needed to scaffold it by breaking it down by section, putting together a vocabulary list and guided reading questions for each one. We read it together as a class and followed the I do-We do-You do format: I modeled how to read the first section, complete the guided reading tasks and summarize the passage in more colloquial language. The students were excited to hear that the work they were doing was akin to that of college students, and that the reading they were doing was taken from the syllabus of my mentor teacher’s college course. They completely rose to the challenge!
Learning Activity 2- Mini Project: Adolescence in Media
After one week working with Nancy Lesko’s article and making sure everyone had a good handle on the characterizations, students worked on a mini project for a few days in class. Each student picked one of the four characterizations to focus on. Their task was to think of an example of either a TV show or movie that enforced their chosen characterization. They then put together slideshows that explained the characterization they picked in their own words, provided a video or detailed description of their example, and explained how their example connects to the characterization, using evidence from the article they read for Learning Activity 1. The article they read, although discussing topics very relevant to students, was challenging and took a lot of time and energy for students to understand, as it was not written in academic language that they were used to consuming. In this project, students had the opportunity to take what they learned the week before and apply it to something they knew like the back of their hand and could speak at length about. This project made the information from the article really click for students, and it was fun to see their personalities shine in their presentations, and to hear them talk so excitedly about the media they consume.
Learning Activity 3- Book Groups and Guided Reading
After the students completed their mini projects, it was time to begin reading the unit’s central texts. While reading The Poet X, we got a lot of good feedback from students on reading in small groups. For this unit, students picked from 4 books, and were separated into 3-4 person “book clubs” according to their choices. One book club read Punching the Air by Ibi Ziboi, one group read Solo by Kwame Alexander, and one group read Me Moth by Amber McBride and Chlorine Sky by Mahogany L. Browne (2 shorter books that together equalled the length of the other books). Allowing them to pick books and read semi-independently was a release of responsibility that we had not tried before in the classroom and the students rose to the occasion. On reading days in school, they split up into their groups and read aloud to each other. On the first day, they set up a calendar for their group that took them all the way through their chosen text. Each day, they were instructed to complete the day’s reading and identify a quote that either enforced or subverted one of the characterizations we had been working with throughout the unit. One of the reasons I really liked this setup was because it allowed us to provide individualized attention to students and adjust the requirements of the unit according to need. When reading on a schedule as a full class, it could be complicated to catch up students who missed class or were just not as fast of readers as the majority of the class. For example, when there was one week left of the book clubs, one group reading Me Moth and Chlorine Sky had only finished Chlorine Sky. Because of the setup of this unit, I was able to tell them not to worry about reading Me Moth, and I worked with them that week to strengthen the responses they had written for Chlorine Sky, which I felt was a more valuable use of class time for them than rushing through a second book.
Learning Activity 4- Analyzing Rhetoric in the News
After students finished their books, I pointed out to them that we had now studied the way stereotypes about adolescence appear in fiction such as literature, film, and TV. The next step was to look at the way they appear in current events. This unit coincided with the explosion of discourse around Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Bill, better known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. We spent a week working with this bill- unpacking the misinformation surrounding it and making sure everybody understood the direct effects it would have in Florida. We also learned about the Parent’s Bill of Rights, a bill that has been signed into law or is pending signing in 3 states. After learning the foundation needed for this activity- the ins and outs of these bills, how a bill becomes a law, the major people involved in these bills- I explained to students that we were going to begin looking at how discourse surrounding these laws connected to the stereotypes about adolescence that we were working with. As a class, we read an abbreviated article from The Miami Herald which argued against the Parental Rights in Education Bill, and answered guided reading questions as a class. These questions referred specifically to the language in the article, whose voices it centered versus left out, and how the author’s writing revealed her beliefs about adolescents. This would prepare the students for Learning Activity 5, where they would do this in small groups without my direct assistance.
Learning Activity 5- “Don’t Say Gay” Stations
After the scaffolding provided by Learning Activity 4, we began a station activity that would allow students to practice applying the same questions to new news sources on their own. There were 4 stations, each with a different article or video regarding either the Parental Bill of Rights or the Parental Rights in Education Bill. Students traveled between stations and answered guided reading questions that asked them whose voices were centered or left out of each article, and instructed students to identify rhetoric that either enforced or subverted the stereotypes we were working with. After students completed each station, they filled out a reflection that asked them to consider what the big-picture consequences of these stereotypes might be. Examples of these can be found in the student work samples.