Unit Designed By:
Kim Summers
Brittany Chen
Liz Porter
Ginnevere
Jocelyn Cheung
Rationale:In this unit, we are making use of the novel American Born Chinese. American Born Chinese is a graphic novel that explores the difficulty of finding personal identity within a mixed culture background. The novel follows three different story lines of The Monkey King, a young boy named Jin, and a racial stereotype character named Chin-Kee. Each of these characters face internal and external challenges that serve to shape their personalities in relation to the world around them, whether it be giving in to peer pressure and trying to abandon their Chinese heritage or just losing sight of their personal beliefs in general. It is our hope that our students will take away from this book not only an understanding of respecting other cultures, but also a personal understanding of the necessity of having their own individual identity they can be proud of.
To guide our students towards this, we will be utilizing a combined method of guided reading and student responses. Since this novel deals with topics of Asian American issues that students may not be familiar with, the beginning of our unit will deal largely with introducing the background on such issues. This is simply to ensure all students are on the same page to begin with. As we get further in, students will daily and in class read new sections of the book, alternately in groups, aloud, and individually. This is to break up the monotony of teacher to student reading and further the engagement of the students with the text. In order to ensure students are in fact absorbing the text, they will also be required to complete daily free-write work. These free-writes will be based on lose, open-ended questions based off of plot, character development, conflicts/resolutions, confusing elements, comical elements, etc. Students will have the opportunity to share these with the class for extra credit to encourage participation and ensure students are in fact absorbing this information.
Similarly, students will also be writing their responses in a blog online. Using our class blog, students will have the opportunity to work every Monday to post a response to various prompts on the text for their classmates to see. During this time, students will not only create their responses but will also respond to their classmates’ posts as well. This not only engages students with the technology of a blog, but also enables them to easily play off each other to expand their knowledge and clarify their understanding of the text should confusion or questions arise, rather than allowing them to depend on the teacher to be spoon-fed all the answers.
As the final element of this unit, students will also be completing their own comics/graphic novels. Using the program Comic Life, students will create their own narratives based on the theme of personal identity. This allows students to be creative with the themes they are learning from the text and enables for self-expression. Students will get 5 class periods to complete this task, and as the comics do not need to be very long, this should be sufficient.
Overall, this unit allows for a great deal of participation, creativity, and a lack of outside of class work. With these methods in hand, we have no doubt our unit will successfully teach the themes and writing skills we wish to advance.
