David Dean
“Mirrors are filled with people. The invisible see us. The forgotten recall us. When we see ourselves, we see them.” –Eduardo Galeano, Mirrors
This curricular unit is designed for use at Street School, an alternative school in Oklahoma. The unit uses independent projects and book studies to help students learn about Indigenous and Latino history and culture in the United States and in the world beyond. It also allows students to explore and appreciate the present and future of Indigenous and Latino people. The independent projects are an opportunity for students to learn and refine research skills on projects, the subjects of which are chosen by themselves. Presenting the projects gives students an opportunity to share their work in a way that raises the stakes for their success. A student who shrugs off an arbitrary-seeming grade on a piece of paper may try harder when they know they will be held accountable in front of an audience of their peers. Presentation skills, of course, have many applications in the world after high school. The book studies help cultivate reading and analytical skills while also helping students develop the ability to discuss and to share informed opinions and to respectfully disagree about books and ideas. The intent is to move students toward graduation outcomes such as curiosity, critical thinking, contextual reasoning, and cultural competency.
Teaching Strategies
This unit blends traditional close-reading book study with a project-based approach to learning. Though I have nearly twenty years of experience using project-based, community-centered learning and have had measurable success with my students (such as the 28.1% single-year growth among my students on the Oklahoma School Testing Program reading test noted by the superintendent of Tulsa Public Schools) others have been doing it longer and have written about the efficacy of these teaching strategies. I first learned about the power of project-based learning during the “Big Bang” training from Elliott Washor and Dennis Littky’s Big Picture Learning (BPL) education nonprofit in Providence, Rhode Island. This training occured in 2008 when BPL was brought in to restructure and reinvigorate the alternative sites of Tulsa Public Schools. In his book The Big Picture: Education Is Everyone’s Business, Littky writes, “We learn best when we care about what we are doing, when we have choices. We learn best when the work has meaning to us, when it matters. We learn best when we are using our hands and our minds. We learn best when the work we are doing is real and relevant.” Littky’s book is a little short on data and long on heart-warming stories, but it makes a compelling case for the concept of project-based learning. Since I have adapted and implemented Littky’s ideas to the classroom, adjusting them for greater academic rigor and cultural relevance to our specific context, my English students have experienced dramatic, measurable increases in reading success—measurable by test scores over a single year and successive years.
In their Hacking Project Based Learning: 10 Easy Steps to PBL and Inquiry in the Classroom, Ross Cooper and Erin Murphy write:
PBL provides students opportunities to grapple with challenging experiences…Through this productive struggle, students work to uncover understandings of content as opposed to serving as bystanders while the teacher covers curriculum through lectures, worksheets, and disconnected tasks. However, creating an environment where students feel comfortable engaging in productive struggle requires a classroom culture established with intentionality.
It is that type of classroom culture and environment that this curricular unit is designed to create.
In Curriculum as Community Building: The Poetics of Difference, Emergence, and Relationality, Liesa Griffin Smith writes,
Like an archaeologist who glimpses something of herself in the illustrated surface of an ornamental vase or urn or clay pot from a time and place and culture not her own, we may also encounter moments of emergence where we may glimpse interconnectedness in the eyes of a stranger. The classroom may become this field in which we labor, teacher and students together with texts and pedagogy, and curriculum—the field of discovery where we may be surprised by the emergence of community.
Smith happens to be the principal of Tulsa School of Arts and Sciences, another highly regarded alternative school in Tulsa. Her book, informed by thinkers such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, is thus also highly relevant and responsive to the challenges of creating curriculum that resonates with and engages alternative school students in our specific context.
Background/Environment
This unit is created for use in my English III and IV classes in a unique educational environment–Street School of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Street School was created in 1973 as an alternative school so students who have been underserved in traditional school settings could find success through learning that plays to their strengths. Street School, due to the therapeutic nature of our program and the unique needs of our students, has six-week sessions instead of two semesters. Each student is assigned to two classes each six-week session, each class limited to thirteen students. In charge of each class is a teacher, who, in addition to being a content specialist in a particular subject area, facilitates engaging and meaningful field trips each session to find connections between students’ areas of interest and the Oklahoma tested subjects: science, mathematics, history, writing, and reading. The focus is on finding the existing strengths in each student and using those to leverage proficiency in areas in which students may still need to improve. Many students who have been turned off of learning at traditional sites find success and, in some cases, even a type of “extended family” at Street School.
Each of my classes can become a kind of learning community, with students often finding connections among their disparate, independently chosen research projects between their school work and their lives beyond school. During our project with the theme “Problem/Solution,” a student doing research on noise pollution, for example, may find common ground with a student researching inequality in education, as our campus is located in a heavy-traffic area, near a busy intersection. Students at elite schools have their own challenges and issues, as all young people do, but do not generally experience window-rattling noise from glass pack mufflers, industrial-grade stereo systems, or truck horns several times a day while trying to write nuanced analytical essays, to grasp the concept of photosynthesis, or to prepare for high-stakes state tests and college entrance exams.
Teachers at our school are given a great deal of curricular latitude, since we must, by whatever methods necessary, help reverse the negative momentum of students who have been underserved at their previous schools or removed from elite schools for fear of lowering the schools’ average test score statistics and damaging their reputations. In this way, all my education work has been directed explicitly and intentionally toward creating equity and fairness for the students I serve.
This unit will support the mission of Street School by encouraging students to engage with Indigenous and Latino literature and history and in so doing to master state-mandated learning objectives in literacy, as well as the use of 21st-century communications technology. Students will also create research projects that analyze and critique past, present, and future events that may engender unfairness and inequality, in order to become agents of progress and change. All this is directed toward the students becoming engaged and informed citizens with the skills to succeed in postsecondary education and the contemporary world.
My Background
I am a product of inner-city public schools in my hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas. This helps me to be familiar with the social context of public schools in Tulsa, which is quite similar in many ways, above all culturally and socioeconomically, to Little Rock. In 1989, I was fortunate enough to participate in Arkansas Governor’s School, which at that time was an innovative free six-week residential summer program designed to expand and enhance the worldviews of rising high school seniors. AGS is still the most significant and formative educational experience of my life. I seek to replicate it in every classroom where I work. The program was perfectly designed to give isolated Arkansan kids hope and to prevent the phenomenon of “brain drain” from the state. Arkansas in the 1980s was what it was, however, and I left as soon as I was able and went as far away as I could go. It was during these travels that I began my work in education as a native English speaker in German-to-English language classes in Graz, Austria in the 1990s. To subsidize a not-too-successful career as a touring musician, I entered the stateside teaching profession in Monroe County schools while living in Bloomington, Indiana in the early 2000s. Shortly thereafter, I moved westward and worked at a Catholic school in San Francisco, California, where my job as a “resource specialist” was to create individualized learning strategies for students underserved by the hidebound teaching methods then current in San Francisco parochial schools. These experiences all helped prepare me for my current job as an alternative school teacher in Oklahoma. Governor’s School helped me to see the progress that could be made in making a young person’s world seem bigger and better in just six weeks. Work in applied linguistics prepared me to be helpful to students learning English for the first time. The schools in Monroe County, Indiana helped prepare me to reverse the tide of underserved students who had been turned off of learning by adverse experiences in underfunded schools. Finally, working as a resource specialist helped me to develop strategies to assist students in developing new skills quickly, to catch up to their peers and the expected level of mastery for their age and grade level. During the seventeen years I’ve been doing alternative education work here–for several years at a site called Tulsa Met and for the past two years at Street School–Tulsa alternative schools have undergone a shift. That shift has changed from students feeling they were “sentenced” at a carceral school with smaller class sizes and a functioning discipline system (which we, perforce, had to have in place) to students and families who learned by word of mouth that schools like Street School, partly as a result of our discipline policies and class sizes, are an anomaly in free 21st-century schools—a safe place where learning is facilitated for all students and all students are considered important, not as an anonymous number or an expendable commodity. Street School is, at the same time, not an “elite” school from which students with low scores or nonstandard behavior are excluded. Street School is a place for every student who is willing to try and who wants to be successful.
Demographics/Whom the Unit Serves
The students with whom I work in English III and IV classes generally fall between the ages of sixteen and twenty, with some being slightly younger or older. Many of our students have repeated grades or been retained due to problems related to their lives or to their previous sites’ challenges with academics or behavior. Others have skipped grades due to high levels of ability. They are generally nearer the end of their secondary schooling than the beginning. Students come from diverse backgrounds and display a wide range of academic skills. Street School is a “majority-minority school.” A high percentage of our students are currently experiencing poverty, as defined by our local government. (100%, for example, qualify for the free lunch program, a relatively objective measure of socioeconomic circumstance.) Students are acutely aware of their economic and social status in a city, state, and country that is politically in flux, with special attention paid by our Latino students to hateful rhetoric and open threats directed toward them and their families from people at both the lowest and highest levels of power and by our Indigenous students to the long, long history of the interaction between the world’s colonizers and colonized.
These realities, like others, are taken into account in the construction of this unit and, like others, will be leveraged when possible to drive home the relevance of resilience and the uses of education, research, and creativity in creating power for oneself and for one’s community.
Anticipated Summative Product/Outcome
At the end of this unit, each student will have closely read, analyzed, and critically responded to a major work of Indigenous or Latino literature. They will develop and demonstrate mastery of literacy skills as they are relevant to the subject matter.
At the end of the unit, students will have created original research projects about some aspect of Indigenous or Latino culture. Many project themes involve selecting and researching role models who seek, or sought, to make our society more equitable. Exemplary potential subjects will appear as part of the slideshow introducing each research unit. These potential subjects for research fall along a broad spectrum of philosophy, belief, and practice. These units are never about prescribing or directing students’ thoughts or beliefs. Rather, they are about exploring and refining the ideas students themselves are already actively forming via their interactions with society, family, community, and culture.
The Unit
The intention of this unit is to evaluate, edit, expand, and create activities to increase students’ familiarity with Indigenous and Latino history and culture. The existing project-based practices in our classroom have met with some success–largely due to the commendable hard work and curiosity of my students. I’d like to use the project- and reading-based model with which my students are familiar to deepen their understanding of Indigenous and Latino history and heritage.
I hope to deepen and expand my own familiarity with Indigenous and Latino history and culture so I can be a more effective adviser and research partner for my students. In particular, I’d like to be more familiar with Indigenous groups’ folklore and religious traditions since a requirement of this unit’s Indigenous peoples Project is familiarity with the selected group’s folklore and traditions. Likewise, I need to be more conversant with Spanish-language primary sources about the conquistadors, since a requirement of this unit’s Spanish Explorer Project is finding a direct quote, in Spanish, from an explorer and translating it into English. This is designed to engender greater curiosity about other language groups while also reinforcing students’ mastery of English literacy in the way only comparative exploration of other languages can. It will also create an appreciation of the challenges language learners overcome so students may become more compassionate to others, even those not exactly like themselves, and become better friends and community members.
Pedagogy
Street School’s model necessitates a number of aspects of this unit. Most notably, this curricular unit will be modular, with components that can be “plugged in” for different six-week sessions of students, and with more possible project topics and readings than could fit into a single six-week session. This reflects a practice at my current innovative/alternative school site–instead of semesters we have sessions of six four-day weeks. There is not time for more than one or two meaningful research projects or book studies in each session. Thus the components can be swapped out to reflect the specific strengths and needs–and even the preexisting interests–of each student and each class. It’s necessary to always have “fresh” content and challenges since the small Street School student body means students frequently repeat the same class, at a higher level, in a different session.
In this way the unit may also be keyed to months celebrating Indigenous and Hispanic heritage–Hispanic Heritage Month, from September 15 to October 15 and Native American Heritage Month, from November 1st to 30th. These are not the only times when Indigenous and Latino heritage should be explored and honored in the classroom, but they are opportunities to focus on honoring these important communities within our Tulsan, Oklahoman, and American community and beyond. Students from related cultural backgrounds are made aware that we honor them and their unique heritage. Students who consider themselves to be from other backgrounds may find commonalities between their heritage and that of Indigenous and Latino students while also appreciating the differences that make each person’s cultural heritage distinctive and important. Multiple versions of the requirements for each project will be created to reflect the preexisting ability of each student and each class–a basic level project for beginners with “fill in the blanks” slideshow templates and relatively lax requirements for citing sources, and an advanced-level project with a blank slideshow template, a detailed rubric, and standard MLA citation requirements that will set students up for postsecondary success.
Readings will be conducted in three alternating ways: reading aloud, reading along with an audiobook, and silent reading, so that each student’s preferred reading style will be used at least a third of the time but each student will also have the opportunity to grow more conversant in and comfortable with new reading formats.
This curricular unit will consist of two aspects: independent projects and class readings. This differentiates the unit for all learners since students who finish the reading activities each day can then work on projects. More advanced readers can create more elaborate projects. Beginning readers can have extra time to complete readings and related activities and then complete relatively rudimentary projects, with teacher support as necessary for each student.
I’d like the background reading, seminar study, and research I have done while preparing this unit to create greater depth and coherence in the projects and reading I facilitate and especially to foster greater expertise so I can better guide and advise students at all levels of understanding, especially toward the Spanish-language texts that are required for some projects. Due to the demanding nature of the projects and reading in this unit, the teacher must become a “research partner” for each student, guiding them and modeling learning and research and presentation techniques so each student may “learn to learn.” In practical, tactical terms, this involves toggling among up to thirteen slideshow projects, sets of study questions, or essays, dispensing praise and making notes and remarks on each. In situations of great need or high achievement, the teacher can move physically throughout the room, helping with issues as simple as signing on or locating the assignment or as complex as deepening the content or style of an already-excellent essay so an experienced writer/researcher becomes still stronger as a result of participation in the unit of study.
Content Objectives
Above all, this curricular unit is designed to help students to master the literacy skills prescribed by the state of Oklahoma. It is, after all, designed for an English class, and I am an English teacher. Before the appreciation of any community or heritage, before the building of cultural bridges and the development of compassion, my main duty, my job, is to help students become better readers, writers, and critical thinkers. The work we do in our classroom engages all Oklahoma Academic Standards, but these are some on which this unit especially focuses. (Eleventh grade objectives are specifically addressed here, but equivalent objectives exist, at an appropriately higher level of complexity and challenge, at the senior level too.) This unit seeks to help develop five key skills that, once mastered, may help unlock literacy and critical thinking across students’ lives:
- actively listening to others using agreed-upon discussion rules with control of verbal and nonverbal cues;
- following agreed-upon rules as they engage in collaborative discussions while expressing their own ideas clearly while building on the ideas of others as they respectfully disagree when necessary;
- summarizing main ideas and paraphrasing significant parts of increasingly complex texts;
- analyzing and evaluating relationships among words with multiple meanings and recognizing connotations and denotations of words;
- and–perhaps most important–using precise, grade-level vocabulary in writing to clearly communicate complex ideas.
Students, and adults after graduation, need to be able to actively listen using agreed-upon discussion rules with control of verbal and nonverbal cues.The research aspect of the independent projects is important. It is through this that students will learn to seek out and to assess the relevance and validity of sources of information about their chosen topic. Just as important, though, is the presentation aspect. Fully a quarter of the assessment rubric for the project involves this final phase of the research–its presentation. After all, knowledge and ideas lose their potency if they cannot be effectively communicated. Students, having learned about new people, practices, or ideas that piqued their interest, now share the aspects they found interesting. Likewise, the students who serve as audience members learn the art of active attention. Their ability to be engaged audience members, and to treat the presenter and the content they are presenting with respect, are also reflected in their final project score, with deductions for every breach in decorum. These skills will be valuable in later life, whether in higher education, as the “scribe” for a Marine boot camp training platoon, or as a participant in mandatory staff meetings in any other profession. Conveying and receiving information, and assessing it once it has been conveyed, is a key human skill. We would neglect it to our peril.
People need to know how to follow agreed-upon rules as they engage in collaborative discussions about what they are reading and writing. One need not read too much news to understand that this is a skill not successfully taught, or if it is not learned, even at the institutions of learning attended by some of our leaders. People also need to express their own ideas clearly and especially to respectfully build on the ideas of others. Perhaps most important, people need experience respectfully disagreeing with one another when necessary. Developing this skill can help in diverse groups and whole-class settings. It’s most important, perhaps, to teach students to disagree with each other when in pairs, when it’s easiest to simply agree with any proposition, however illogical or untested. As Kurt Vonnegut writes in Breakfast of Champions, “So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines. All their minds had to do was to discover what other people were thinking, and then they thought that, too.” No end of social problems have their origins in people agreeing and encouraging each other to ever-growing heights of hateful ridiculousness. “Yes, that’s exactly right,” is easier at the time, but “I understand what you mean, but actually, have you considered…?” is so much more valuable. Though students should display a minimum degree of respect for the speaker presenting and the subject of theory research, it is never necessary to agree with the presenter’s conclusions or with the ideas or actions of the subject of the research. Civil practices for challenging ideas are also inculcated in the best of their project presentations. A classroom should never be a place where “acceptable” ideas are force-fed. If it is, students trained in orthodoxy are left vulnerable to the next demagogue they encounter. Rather, a classroom should be a place of inquiry where reasoned disagreement–with the presenter’s opinions and conclusions and with those of the research topic–can be civilly, rationally expressed.
Students need to be able to summarize the main ideas and paraphrase significant parts of increasingly complex texts. In order to understand a long and complex text over time, it’s necessary to explain and interpret it to oneself, both as one goes along and summatively afterward, to “file it away” under its title as a series of ideas, plot points, and, perhaps most important, emotional experiences. In an ideal world, students would arrive at Street School at grade level for reading and textual analysis and we would proceed from there. In the world as it is, no one comes to an alternative education site because their previous site was ideal. Instead, students often arrive at Street School with significant learning loss. The recent pandemic lockdown has, of course, exacerbated this situation. As a result, this unit starts with texts written on a very basic level–children’s books or comics, sometimes about subjects not directly related to Indigenous or Latinx history and culture–and works toward mastery of grade-level fiction and nonfiction texts by the end of the six-week session. If students can master and become confident with analysis of texts they can easily read, understand, and enjoy, they are much more confident and engaged later when presented with more structurally and linguistically sophisticated material.
To read and understand fluently, a person must be able to analyze and evaluate the relationships among words with multiple meanings and recognize the connotation and denotation of words. This unit especially lends itself to this skill since so many of the texts originally appeared in languages other than English, above all Spanish. By using the Spanish text of Like Water for Chocolate, it will be possible to look at selected passages from the book in both Spanish and English and analyze cognates and their origins. Likewise, translated neologisms such as “versed” and the rather coarse “shucked” (which seems to mean either something as serious as sexual intercourse or as inconsequential as making out) in Signs Preceding the End of the World will generate student interest. In a 1977 interview with William F. Buckley on the television program Firing Line, Jorge Luis Borges alluded to the richness of English vocabulary as opposed to “purer” languages such as his native Spanish.
Borges: I have done most of my reading in English. I find English a far finer language than Spanish. Buckley: Why? Borges: Well, many reasons. Firstly, English is both a Germanic and a Latin language. Those two registers—for any idea you take, you have two words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example if I say “regal” that is not exactly the same thing as saying “kingly.”
This is a generous characterization. Other less enamored learners of English, both native speakers and those who learn the language later in life, may perceive this “richness” as a type of chaos with its roots in the Norman conquest of Britain and the subsequent military adventures of what Winston Churchill called “the English-speaking peoples,” in his multi-volume History of the English-speaking Peoples, in which he shared his opinion that the United States is something like an extension of Great Britain by other means. However insightful this perception may (or may not) be, it’s true that understanding connotations of English words is a valuable skill. In particular, Latin-derived words that came to English via the conqueror-administrator language of Norman French are still often the language of authority and law in English-speaking areas. A developed understanding of this type of language is a requisite for functioning competently or even safely in such spaces. Likewise, a respect for dialects in English and other languages as different and distinctive but not “less than” is necessary for speakers of dialect variants to feel respected and thus to be able to grant others respect and avoid unnecessary or unwanted conflict. It’s wrong to speak of “proper English,” as opposed to “improper” and ever-evolving dialect variants. It is useful to explore the concept of international, standard English that can be understood by most speakers versus cultural and regional dialect variants that can be more useful and appropriate is certain contexts—just as Spanish is more useful and appropriate in some contexts, even in places and times where the dominant language is considered to be standard international English or even a regionally-accented variant or dialect of English. Analyzing and evaluating the relationships among words with multiple meanings and recognizing the connotation and denotation of words is a valuable skill in the decoding of complex language. A key skill in understanding complex language can be knowing the origin and etymology of words. Much complex English language, such as “legalese,” seems “foreign” to English speakers because of the latinate origins of many of the words–a legacy of the Norman Conquest of 1066. Students’ greater facility with translation of Latin-based words and phrases such as quotations from Spanish explorers or the Spanish and Indigenous words and phrases sprinkled through texts like The House on Mango Street and Like Water for Chocolate can help to create a basis for greater understanding and develop skills for further language translation and decoding.
Finally, students need to be able to use precise, grade-level vocabulary in writing to clearly communicate complex ideas. This proposition is probably not in need of extensive proselytization. Of course, the objective of all learning in English class is to help students develop into effective, confident readers and writers. The final examination in all sessions is an essay reflecting on, and finding connections among, the texts explored during the six-week session.
Readings
Signs Preceding the End of the World, by Yuri Herrera
The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros
Like Water for Chocolate, by Laura Esquivel
The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, is a text accessible to most readers. It is a good introduction to Puerto Rican and Chicano life in American cities and is a universal enough coming of age tale to resonate with most readers. Beginning readers are grateful for the short chapters. This book is a good one for increasing confidence in readers who traditionally struggle with novels. At the same time, its deft and subtle use of figurative language, internal rhyme, onomatopoeia, and other poetic devices, and Spanish words and idioms mean it’s also a rich text for more advanced readers. Perhaps most important of all, it reflects the lived experience of Latino students in a way that fosters engagement and leads to rich classroom discussion.
Like Water for Chocolate, by Laura Esquivel, is a text that rewards more advanced readers. The soap opera-like story and recipe-based format involve readers who might be turned off by a more traditional novel. The Mexican setting and references to pre-Columbian and Indigenous characters and cultural practices and to Mexican history (especially the Mexican Civil War as it was experienced at the Mexico/U.S. border) create relevance and engagement and bristle with teachable moments. Using the original Spanish text concurrently allows for rich comparative readings with, once again, biliterate students in a position to be authorities and to be magnanimous with those of us who have not yet mastered Spanish.
Signs Preceding the End of the World, by Yuri Herrera, is a much more contemporary look at Mexican life. It may resonate more strongly with 21st century high school students than The House on Mango Street, which is set in Chicago in the 1980s,or Like Water for Chocolate, which is set in Mexico in the early 1900s. Herrera’s practice of leaving specific geographic locations unnamed means they could be universal…and just maybe could be the places and times from their own lives that students find most relevant and important.
Independent Project Topics
“A Living Indigenous Role Model”
The independent projects will be on the following topics:
The Columbian Exchange project will explore the idea of the exploration of the New World subsequent to Columbus’s 1492 landfall and especially the origins of common plants, animals, foods, and diseases. Prior to the European colonization of the Americas, many staple crops like potatoes, chocolate, and corn (maize) were unknown in the Eastern Hemisphere. Likewise, animals like horses, cattle, and pigs were unknown in the Western Hemisphere. The “Columbian Exchange” refers to the exchange of new organisms and practices between the two hemispheres. Unfortunately, a number of highly infectious, often deadly diseases were also a part of the Columbian exchange. This had devastating consequences for the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and an irreversible effect on the history of the world.
The An Indigenous Group project introduction explains that the people sometimes called Native Americans and formerly known as Indians are an extremely diverse group, with 537 separate federally recognized nationalities in the United States alone. Each student will be encouraged to choose a group based on interest or–especially in Oklahoma–a personal or family connection. As with every project, an introductory slideshow will provide examples. Exemplary slideshows of varying complexity from previous years will be shown. A clip from the motion picture Apocalypto, in which a man who speaks the Maya language Yucateco is fleeing human sacrifice when he encounters Spanish conquistadors, is shown to create context and to increase engagement. As students explore traditional foods, architecture, folklore, and other aspects, their presentations highlight how many parallels exist among the groups (such as the “three sisters” milpa food culture general throughout Abya Yaya, or the Americas,) and the important differences among the groups, such as language and traditional architecture and dress. Students curious about groups from places outside the Americas are encouraged to explore indigenous cultures from places like Siberia and New Zealand, with music competitions (America’s Got Talent) and feature films (Hunt for the Wilderpeople) that highlight Indigenous cultures outside the Americas.
The Living Indigenous Role Model project introduction makes the point that Indigenous groups don’t exist only in the past but in the present, and will continue to exist in the future. It also makes it clear that indigenous people exist not only as groups but as distinct individuals in that past, present, and future. Because Oklahoma has an especially high proportion of Indigenous people, many of whom do remarkable things, part of this project could include visits to the classroom from various Indigenous role models, including artists, activists, and professionals. A viewing of episode one of the Reservation Dogs TV program helps create context and increase engagement. The universally popular Hot Cheetos or Takis snacks are served as we watch the program to create a 4D effect since the episode focuses on the theft of a Flamin’ Flamers snack truck and the nutritional issues general on reservations (which have a parallel in some areas of Tulsa where our students live.) The feature film Smoke Signals will complete the session and will be one of the elective topics for the final exam essay test.
The Spanish Explorer/Conquistador project explores an important part of American history–the first contact between indigenous peoples and European explorers. It also makes the point that the first European language and culture to contact the Americas was Spanish, an interesting point to acknowledge during Hispanic Heritage Month. It is something of a tightrope walk, however. Because this may support the legitimacy of the Spanish language in the Americas, the conquistadors were not all completely disinterested, humane spreaders of high ideals, these proclivities being more or less a matter of degree, on a continuum sometimes thought of as ranging from Cabaza de Vaca, who through his own experiences becoming enslaved during his journeys may have become something of a proto-abolitionist, to Pizarro, whose cruelty and ruthlessness made him a moral monster in his time but who is now an enduring subject of fascination for a certain type of high school student researcher. Students who find historical outrages fascinating–the “true crime” podcast kids–will find much to explore in the viciousness of the conquistadors, while students who approach history from a perspective of progress will find ample evidence of the diversity of thought and practice in the European exploration of the Americas. Whatever the perspective of individual students, knowledge of the early age of exploration is solid American history content and will serve to reinforce, through distributed practice, learning in other classes, most notably world history and American history. An aspect of this project that inverts common power relations is the requirement to find a quote from (or, failing that, about) the explorer in Spanish and to master the use of Google Translate to translate the quote into English, breaking it down word by word during presentation time. Biliterate students, sometimes at a disadvantage in English classes, suddenly become the most competent and can offer assistance to students who know one language well and are ordinarily in the privileged position of offering or withholding assistance (if they come from households where language skills are taught from a young age.) This creates a reciprocity among language groups and gives Spanish speaking students a chance to shine in their own projects and to assist in presentations with Spanish slides. (I am, of course, always ready to assist, should no helpful student rise to the occasion…but this has never happened. Kids are decent and helpful to each other, given a chance to be that way. People like to help each other; we’re evolved that way.)
The Notable Latino Project, like the Living Indigenous Role Model Project, brings awareness of Hispanic heritage into the present during Hispanic Heritage Month by highlighting notable Latino people from America’s present and recent past. Depending on students’ familiarity with research projects, certain constraints can be put in place, such as not allowing projects about people mostly known for crime (such as cartel lords) or about people in stereotypical professions such as athletes or entertainers. This is another tightrope-walk since entertainers and athletes capture the imagination of many young people, so this constraint is also modular and may be “plugged in” or unplugged to reflect the makeup of the specific class. A requirement in each of these projects is a short video which increases interest and engagement while inculcating 21st-century media competencies.
Student-created End-of-Session Products
At the end of each session, students will create a well-organized essay synthesizing and summarizing their reading and research, typically in the compare-and-contrast format. This is both to gauge students’ mastery of the texts and research subjects and to advance the Street School graduation goals of post-secondary success. Students are generally given multiple topics from among which to choose. Students are encouraged to write to the prompt that will best showcase their analytical and writing ability (as well as the one they think will be the most interesting and fun.) A typical final essay prompt–the example below is from a previous session whose theme was not specifically Indigenous and Latino history and culture–addresses multiple texts and projects completed during the session.
A student response to one of the prompts is worth printing in its entirety. This example is by no means perfect but gives a general idea of the sort of responses Street School students are capable of producing.
In this text written essay, I will be comparing the lives and personalities of Esperanza from House on Mango Street to that of heavy metal drummer Dave Lombardo. I believe this project to be interesting and quite simple. Generally speaking I don’t think the drummer of the heavy metal band Slayer and the main character from the novel are very similar, but on closer inspection, they do have similarities.
Let’s begin by evaluating the fictional character Esperanza from House on Mango Street. Esperanza is a Latina girl from Chicago in the early-to-mid nineteen eighties. She is a Mexican-American who lives at a house on a street called Mango Street. She lives with her family. She seems to be quite shy but definitely not introverted. She seems to have self esteem issues as well, that idea being supported by the metaphoric line “Four skinny trees with skinny necks and pointy elbows like mine.” I think this means she sees herself and her perceived physical flaws in the gawky young trees planted in the sidewalk outside her house. This quote shows a lot about the character.
Now let’s take a moment from Esperanza to look at the nonfictional character, drummer Dave Lombardo. David Lombardo is a fifty-eight year old heavy metal drummer known for his role on the kit for notorious thrash band Slayer. Slayer is known for being one of the pioneering bands in the thrash metal subgenre. Outside of Slayer he’s also been seen with bands like Misfits, Suicidal Tendencies, Mr. Bungle, and more as well as his own work. He is a father and husband. Dave Lombardo has been active in the music scene since 1979
Now for the most difficult and the easiest part of this essay. Compare and contrast, I deem this the easiest and hardest part because let’s analyze what is being compared and contrasted. On one hand we have a developing teenage girl in the eighties, Esperanza, who’s having a tough time growing up. She will be compared to a fifty-eight year old metal drummer and father from Cuba who delivered pizza for a living at sixteen. Nonetheless it shall be done. How are they different? Well let’s start with the obvious and progressively move to the more obscure information. Dave is a male and Esperanza is a female. One is just reaching adulthood and the other is pushing sixty. Esperanza is a Mexican-American, Lombardo is a Cuban-American of Italian descent. Dave plays drums for many different bands but most notably Slayer. Esperanza works at a place called Peter Pan Photo Finishers. Lombardo went to a school called South Gate in California, whereas Esperanza goes to a convent school in Chicago. Now let’s move to similarities. Both Lombardo and Esperanza are Latinx people who live in America. They’re both human (Lombardo’s humanity is questionable, for how good at drumming he is). They have to breathe, eat, sleep, pay taxes, and breathe air. Both live on the same planet, Earth, the same way everyone else does. Esperanza has had traumatic experiences, and I’m most certain Lombardo has as well, being involved with heavy metal music. They both feel love and want to be loved, Esperanza with her love-interest Sire and Dave Lombardo with his wife, Paula Lombardo.
The essay, of course, does several things an essay is not supposed to do. Addressing the reader directly (and by name!) is not generally considered to be part of successful academic writing, nor, traditionally, is first person point of view. The analysis of the book and the character Esperanza is rather superficial. Still, the essay reveals an understanding of the basic five-paragraph format and function of a compare-and-contrast essay as well as standard English usage in the areas of spelling, punctuation, and grammar. These capacities are not general among students when they arrive at alternative sites such as Street School, and the student who wrote the essay was not familiar with essay structure or standard English usage prior to our work together during the six-week session. Most importantly, I believe the essay shows engagement with the class, the reading and research and–most crucially–an understanding of a connection between the student’s passions and interests (in this case heavy metal music) and America’s and the world’s Latino population. It is this realization–that Latino culture and history is inseparably the world’s culture and history and is connected to all people and the things we most deeply love and care about–that is the end goal of this unit. Though the essay may leave much room for improvement in future sessions and in college intro-to-composition classes, by the measure of this curricular unit’s desired outcomes, the student’s work is a success.
Bibliography
Churchill, Winston. A History of the English-speaking Peoples. New York, Dorset Press, 1990.
Cisneros, Sandra. 2004. The House on Mango Street. London, England: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.
Cooper, Ross, and Erin Murphy. Hacking Project Based Learning: 10 Easy Steps to PBL and Inquiry in the Classroom. Times 10 Publications, 2018.
Cooper, Ross, and Erin Murphy. Project based learning: Real questions, real answers, how to unpack PBL and Inquiry. Highland Heights, OH: Times 10 Publications, 2021.
Esquivel, Laura. 1993. Like Water for Chocolate. London, England: Black Swan.
Esquivel, Laura. 1989. Como Agua Para Chocolate. Nuevas Ediciones de Bolsillo.
Herrera, Yuri, and Lisa Dillman. Signs preceding the end of the world. London – New York. And Other Stories, 2015.
Landa, Diego de. (2020). Relación de las cosas de yucatán. Linkgua Ediciones.
Landa, Diego de, & Tozzer, A. M. (1966). Relación de las cosas de yucatán. A translation. Kraus Reprint Corp.
Littky, Dennis, and Samantha Grabelle. The Big Picture: Education is Everyone’s Business. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2004.
Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar, active 16th century. The Journey of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza De Vaca. Chicago :Rio Grande Press, 1905.
Portilla, Miguel León. Aztec thought and culture: A study of the ancient nahuatl mind. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963.
Smith, Liesa Griffin. Curriculum as community building: The poetics of difference, emergence, and relationality. New York: Peter Lang, 2021.
Stavans, Ilan, Gabriela Larios, and Homero Aridjis. Popol Vuh: A retelling. Brooklyn, NY: Restless Books, 2020.
Tedlock, Dennis. Popol Vuh: The definitive edition of the mayan book of the dawn of life and the glories of gods and kings. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.
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Appendix
During a six-week session, it’s not always possible to completely and effectively inculcate all Oklahoma standards for reading and writing, even if all of them are systematically touched upon. This unit focuses on a few key objectives all students must master if they are to be fluent users of English. Shown here are junior-level standards but each of these has a similar senior-level equivalent, adjusted for a slightly higher level of rigor.
11.1.L.1 Students will actively listen using agreed-upon discussion rules with control of verbal and nonverbal cues.
11.1.S.2 Students will follow agreed-upon rules as they engage in collaborative discussions about what they are reading and writing, expressing their own ideas clearly, building on the ideas of others, and respectfully disagreeing when necessary in pairs, diverse groups, and whole-class settings.
11.2.R.1 Students will summarize the main ideas and paraphrase significant parts of increasingly complex texts.
11.4.R.4 Students will analyze and evaluate the relationships among words with multiple meanings and recognize the connotation and denotation of words.
11.4.W.1 Students will use precise, grade-level vocabulary in writing to clearly communicate complex ideas.