Dovetailing from the "Where I'm From" poetry assignment, I like to give a writing assignment called "My Own Diversity"......
My students typically feel proud and emboldened after their "Where I'm From" poems; they feel that their voice matters in the classroom, that they have something valuable to say (particularly about themselves), and they realize that writing is not as hard as it's sometimes cracked up to be.
This leads into the "My Own Diversity" assignment, which attempts to subtly teach a more formal writing style (following and outline format) without making it the crux of the lesson. The objective is to have the students reveal themselves in more detail than the poem did, while connecting their background to their future goals. I recently used this assignment in English class of our Community Health Workers program at Summit Academy. Here how it looked:
Knowing yourself and understanding what makes you different from others is an important aspect to community health work. It allows you to put yourself in other people's shoes, while also better enabling you to empower individuals to overcome barriers. For this assignment, you will do the following:
TOPIC 1- Tell me about your background. For example, where did you grow up? How many brothers and sisters do you have? What was your family like?
TOPIC 2- What are some of your favorite things to do or places to go, and why? What are some of your hobbies? What are you passionate about?
TOPIC 3- What makes you different from other people? What qualities make you special? What are your strengths? What things about yourself would you like to improve or work on, and why?
TOPIC 4- How will your diversity (the various things that make you who you are) help you to be a better community health worker? Explain why.
I let the students know that I'm grading spelling, grammar and punctuation. But it's not the focus of the grading. Rather, I'm primarily looking to see that each topic is fully fleshed out, and that the writing is organized by topic.
To me, this is a nice transition from the "Where I'm From" poem, as it helps to take students' ideas from their poem and develop them into a more formal structure. And of course, for many students, they are their own favorite subject.
Final Assignment
13 years ago
Hello Jamie -
ReplyDeleteI like that poem assignment - I tend to give my students something similar at the beginning of the World Lit course. I often struggle with how non-specific the poems are that I get back from kids though. Like "I like baseball" "I help people whenever I can". Hmmm. Interesting. Thanks for making me read that. I'm trying to figure out how to require a higher level of specificity. My students are 11th grade, and I think I need to give them some pretty explicit examples of both what I'm not looking for and what I am looking for.
But anyways, apparently this comment is less about your blog than it is about me. OK. Sorry.
A nice follow up to this may even be "what I'd like to be". It's great that you've come up with specific questions to elicit personal experience from kids (and I hope you were successful). Oftentimes, I think kids enjoy fiction as a way of escaping their situations (not that all your students are in bad situations, but even just the monotony of day to day life) so I wouldn't be surprised if they could use something like this as jumping off point for creative writing about what they could be if they could be anything at all (space adventurers et al.) Good assignment!
ReplyDeleteJamie, I also like this assignment. I think the four topics provide a solid structure to the assignment, though for me I think the second one would be the most fun and the third the hardest.
ReplyDeleteThis part: It allows you to put yourself in other people's shoes, while also better enabling you to empower individuals to overcome barriers.
I like what you had to say there ... their both important skills. Nice work!