Hillary decides to use several CRP principles to teach TKM. She especially likes the principles Get to Know Your Students and Create a Learning Community. To introduce TKM, Hillary describes the time period and the setting, and gives a brief overview of the plot as suggested by the curriculum guide (see Appendix A). She notes that the curriculum guide contains no reference to TKM being set in the Jim Crow era, so Hillary shares that information with her students. Also, she also wants to know more about her students’ lives and interests, and which themes and topics in TKM are relevant to them. Hillary prompts the class: “Now that I’ve told you some information about plot and setting for TKM, what are your impressions of the book? What do you know about the time period? What have you heard about life in the Jim Crow South? Are there similarities or differences that you can find between life now and life back then? Write down your list in your notebook for the next 90 seconds.”
After the students finish, she asks four or five students at a time to come to the white board and write a word or phrase from their notebooks. Collectively, these words and phrases create a word collage (see Appendix B).
Hillary asks the students to take a look at their collage and to take note of the various topics and themes that they could talk about in TKM. Students pick up on several themes, including racism, sexism, poverty, hopelessness and friendship. Hillary knows her students should find these themes relatable and compelling, but she worries that the historical context will impede their ability to connect with the novel. Using what she learned in the CRP workshop about building on students’ interests and bringing examples from students’ lives, Hillary decides to incorporate a contemporary work in a medium that students enjoy, hip-hop. Hillary isn’t much of a music buff herself, and generally prefers other genres, so she asks a few students, some friends and a colleague or two if they can recommend any hip-hop or rap songs that discuss the TKM themes identified by the students. After sorting through several recommendations, she settles on Kayne West’s 2004 song “All Falls Down.”
The next day, Hillary brings in copies of the lyrics for “All Falls Down” that she downloaded online, after editing the inappropriate language (see Appendix C). She asks students to read the lyrics while she plays the YouTube video. Nearly all the students know the song, and they enthusiastically sing and dance along with the video. Afterward, Hillary asks the students to analyze Kanye West’s message and his descriptions of the things that “fall down” in our lives. As students read through the beginning chapters of TKM, they compare and contrast the things that are falling down in Scout’s life with the issues that West describes in “All Falls Down.”
Hillary Has New Issues to Consider
Energized by the discussion, Hillary uses “All Falls Down” as an anchor text and refers to it as the students read through the first few chapters of the novel. But she still is uncertain about the issue of race and racism, especially the recurring use of the n-word, in TKM. At the Teaching Tolerance website, Hillary reads an article written by an English teacher called “Facing the ‘N Word’” and decides to approach this topic in an open manner within her own class.
In class, Hillary uses “All Falls Down” to start a discussion about the n-word because it is a word that Kanye West uses in the song. She frames the activity as a debate about the meaning of the n-word and asks students to stand on the left side (yes) or the right side (no) of the classroom depending on their personal perspectives. Hillary asks students a series of questions (Who can use the n-word? Kanye West? Scout? Bob Ewell? Author Harper Lee? You?), and students move to the left or right according to their own perspective. Afterward, Hillary facilitates a conversation about the N-word with the entire class, and they use the exercise to discuss the historical contexts and social interpretations of the N-word in TKM and in contemporary society.
Inspired by these discussions, Hillary continues to draw on “All Falls Down” to talk about race and racism in TKM. She uses Think-Pair-Share for the activity (see Appendix D). During the Think phase, Hillary asks students to underline or highlight lines in the transcript that illustrate Kanye West’s thoughts and perspectives on race and to write why they selected those lines. During the Pair phase, students talk with their partners about the lines they identified, and in the Share phase, students share their responses with the class. Afterward, Hillary asks the students to use a three-circle Venn diagram, a graphic organizer, to compare and contrast how racism affected the lives of the major characters in TKM, how it affects African American people today according to Kanye West’s “All Falls Down” and how racism has affected their own lives (see Appendix E).
Hillary Realizes That Culturally Relevant Pedagogy Fosters Learning of Academic Knowledge
Read about how teachers who are sensitive to cultural relevancy use their students’ discourse, interests and cultural knowledge as a bridge to academic knowledge.
Next step: Finale
