| LESSON | TEACHER | FULL LESSONS |
| 1 | D. Schwartz | Lessons From the ALRI |
| 2 | A. Dumas | Homebuying in a Homeless Shelter |
| 3 | M. Hassett | Exploring Concepts of Home |
| 4 | M. Hassett | Exploring Concepts of Home |
1) Themes of Home by Deborah Schwartz, Adult Literacy Resource Institute, Boston
OVERVIEW: This lesson first grew out of a series of in-class discussions and writing activities that I facilitated in my role as ABE teacher at the Archdale Family Literacy Project (AFLP) in the Spring of 1998. Throughout the course of the lessons, my adult students offered feedback on what and how they were learning. They were hooked into the lessons that expressive writing and literature offered them and they wanted a say about things. At the end of the unit, the class revised the lesson plans and looked for a new group of students to try it out on. At the community center where the family literacy program was held, we found some teenagers who were willing.
One evening after the Archdale Family Literacy Project's regular hours of operation, the adult students and I tried out the new version of lessons with a small group of youth aged 14-18 who in their words were "looking for something to do." Now, after participating in conversations with this year's homebuying readiness project teachers, conversations where we would speak about the valuable and surprising ways in which literature and creative writing had crept into the homebuying readiness lessons, I went back to the original AFLP lessons, and revised again.
The writing, reading and revising activities are meant to introduce students to the topic of homebuying. The lessons are also meant to jar students' memory, encourage students to experiment with and deepen their use of metaphor, rhythm and story, invite students to study how other writers use these tools of the trade and demonstrate to students how to practice applying some of what they've learned to their own work.
SESSION ONE: A THREE PART WRITING EXERCISE (Finding Voice through Memory):
A. Revisiting Your First Home: a pre-writing activity to be done without pen or paper
Ask your students to close their eyes and picture walking through the first house they ever lived in.
Tell them this, or something like this: "If you cannot remember the first house you ever lived in, be content to imagine the first house you do remember. Or perhaps, the house you live in now is the only house you ever lived in. What ever the circumstances, you are going to imagine slowly walking through each room and looking carefully at each detail in that room."
"First enter the front or side or back door. Do you have a key? Is the door open? Are there smells of cooking or food coming from the kitchen? The sound of a t.v. or radio? What or who greets you as you walk through the front door. And where do you end up once you've walked through the door? In a hallway? A room?"
"In the next few minutes you will walk your way through the house, trying to remember as much detail as possible. What colors are the walls? Are there pictures on them or photographs? What kind of furniture sits in each room? As you slowly walk through the house, remember as much as you can about each room. You can pan the room or scan from the bottom of the floor to the top of the ceiling. You can also look out windows, under the cushions of sofas or through magazine racks. Or you can just enter the room and see what strikes you about it- see what first comes barreling through the filter of your memory."
"The point is to go as slowly as possible and to observe what you see as if you are actually visiting the house. You will have at least ten minutes of undisturbed time to do this exercise. You will not have to report back what you've found. You will walk through the house slowly and take as much time as you like in each room."
"OK, open your front, side or back door and enter the house."
Possible Modifications: As a class, brainstorm possible questions to help draw out details about each room. Do this before you begin the visualization.
Ask the student-writer to walk through the house at various ages and times of his/her life, for instance, as an eight year old coming home from school or on a rainy day.
Hints To the Teacher: If a student is having a hard time visualizing the house, you can work individually, asking him or her to describe the rooms in the house to you while you record. Or you can prompt their memory with questions that ask for a detailed and a specific kind of recall, i.e.: What room are you in right now? Are you standing or walking on a hardwood floor? A carpet, linoleum? What do you see when you stand in the center of the room and look straight ahead? Does the room smell a particular way? Are there windows? Are they open? What's the temperature like in the house?
B. Refining Memory in Preparation for Writing; part two of the pre-writing activity
(involving drawing and graphing)
Materials: graph and unlined paper, pencil or pen
Ask student-writers to draw a floor plan of their remembered house. When students are done drawing the floor plan,
ask them to place an object of significance in each of the rooms. Most likely, the memory of the objects will come from the previous visualization activity, but if not, that's fine too.
C. Timed, Focused Free-Writing Exercises (The actual writing)
Ask students to choose three objects that they placed in their house.
Ask students to write about the objects spending five to seven minutes on each one.
Materials: writing journal or paper, pens, pencils or markers, floor plan of student's house
Hint to the Teacher; a note about focused free-writing exercises:
Much has been written about timed, or focused, free-writing. It's the kinesthetic practice of writing that treats the mind like an active body part. Natalie Goldberg (Writing Down the Bones & Wild Mind) and Peter Elbow (Writing Without Teachers) are among its' gurus. But even without guidance or prompt, you and your student can practice free writing easily: 1. Choose a topic, poem, image, feeling, phrase, shopping list or memory to write about for a short, timed period. 2. Keep your hand moving across the page, or as the case may be, punching the keyboard. Do it for the whole period of time. 3. If you can't think of what to write, write that: "I have nothing to say." But keep your hand moving no matter what. 4. Share your work afterwards without asking for feedback or judgment, keep it for posterity, or as in this case, save it for revision. 5. Practice this form of expression like one practices lifting weights adding more or different weights as one grows stronger.
SESSION TWO: EXPLORING THE LITERATURE OF HOME (Hearing 0thers)
(The writings I used with students):
Poetry
Clifton, Lucille. "in the inner city" in good woman: poems and a memoir 1969-1980.
Doty, Mark. "Demolition" & "No" in My Alexandria.
Gallagher, Tess. "Willingly" in Amplitude.
Hughes Langston. "I, Too" in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes.
Oliver, Mary. "The House" in New and Selected Poems.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. "Autumn Day" in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Stephen Mitchell).
Rukeyser, Muriel. "Song" in A Muriel Rukeyser Reader (ed. Jan Heller Levi)
Shikibu, Izumi. "When the netted fence of spiderwebs…" in The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Kamachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (trans. Jane Hirshfield & Mariko Aratani.
Fiction
Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved.
REACTIONS (MAKING MEANING OF THE LITERATURE):
What did the writing remind you of - a person you know, something that you remember happening to you, a song?
What did the literature make you feel? Sad, happy, excited, scared? Maybe it didn't move you at all which often happens when you first look at or read something, if so don't worry about it and move on to another piece of writing in the packet.
If you did think some thought about the piece or feel some feeling about it or have a question you might want to ask the writer, do at least one of the following exercises to learn more about your reaction to the poem or story:
Assign the poem or story a color. Find that color in things, places and people and make a list of where that color can be found.
Sing the poem or imagine who would ask sing it and how. Write about that.
Draw a house that looks like the poem? How big or small is the house? Is the house in good condition? Who lives there? Draw or tell a story about the house you've drawn.
Write a poem or story or cartoon strip or rap or song or drawing or
doodle back to the author.
EXPLICATING LINES, IMAGES AND METAPHORS:
Choose one line. Copy it on a piece of paper and do a free write.
Choose one image or metaphor, draw it.
Find one metaphor or simile, change it. Compete with it, seeing how
many different metaphors or similes you can generate from this one original.
SESSION THREE: REVISING CREATIVELY (Refining Voice)
A NOTE ABOUT REVISION:
Because revision is the willingness to experiment until you get something right, and because, as the poet Edward Hirsh tells us: "A poem has it's own meaning encoded in it, the key to unlocking its meaning is found only in each individual poem," revising poetry is allowing the poem to become what it is supposed to be. Therefore you will have to try many things to make the poem become itself. For that reason keep every draft or change to your work so that nothing is lost and so that, if you want to, after experimenting, you can still, always, come back to your original.
REVISION STRATEGIES:
1. Cut up your favorite lines in your own writing, Don't worry about story, chronology or even making sense. Place those lines or phrases on a big piece of paper, moving them around till they pose a problem or ask a question or just look good together. You are the editor now and you are looking for original thoughts and images, descriptions and word sounds. Remember to be sure to save an original copy of your unhampered writing. Play with the order of these favorite phrases, sentences or passages. Are some of them asking for more information or imagery or description. Open up those passages by creating room on your page and adding what needs to be added. Play with order again. What are the images you've created teaching you about where the poem is supposed to go? Do you like the rhythm of the whole thing? Are you interested in the writing like you were interested in the other writing we looked at? After each revision ask yourself if you like where the writing is going? There will be times where you won't. Produce three to four drafts. As a class we will vote on these drafts and possibly ask you for clarification of certain passages.
2. Ask your classmates to explain why they voted on it as their favorite. Is your favorite the same as the class's? If not, tell them which draft is your favorite and why. Because you are the writer, the author (which is the root word in authority) you are welcome to take their advice or leave it. Put the poem away for a whole week. Do you still like it as it is? Or is there more work to do on it? If you revise it some more, be sure to keep each draft.
3. Tap out or drum the rhythm of a stanza of a poem or paragraph of a story from the packet. Teach that rhythm to another student. That rhythm may remind you of something else- sweeping the kitchen floor, or the engine of the school bus or the talk of your friends. You can name the rhythm or not. But either way, look back at a section of your own work listening to that rhythm and change words or phrases in your own work that exaggerates that rhythm.
4. Choose one line from the poem or story in the packet that you love. Incorporate it into your own writing either explicitly (stick it in there) or implicitly (let the image, word choice, or idea slip into your own words).
5. Ask yourself if you have learned anything new from your own writing. Go back and revise again.
SESSION FOUR: PERFORMING
Finish with an in-class reading, a program-wide poetry slam, or a celebration
with performance, mask making, music playing and lots of food!
2) Writing Letter- Poetry by Ashley Dumas, Project Hope
To write letter-poetry, students take the letters in a word and come up with related words that begin with each letter. For example, if I were to write letter-poetry with my name ASHLEY, I could write, "Accepting Smart Healthy Lovable Excited Youthful".
I had students read examples of letter-poetry from former students'
writing. Then, I had them write letter-poetry using words related to homebuying,
including: HOME, HOUSE, LOAN, and GOALS.
3) Exploring the Concept of Home by Marie Hassett, ABCD's LearningWorks
The following self-designed lessons- What is a Home?, A Poet's View of America as Home and, The House on Mango Street, ask students to write and reflect about the topic of home by reading literature and literary statements that explore that topic.
WHAT IS A HOME?
Vocabulary:
Describe the place that has been most homelike to you.
A POET'S VIEW OF AMERICA AS HOME
Vocabulary:
Abelardo Delgado, "Stupid America."
Questions:
Describe a stereotype that affects your life.
THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET
Reading:
Sandra Cisneros, "The House on Mango Street"
Questions:
4) An Annotated Bibliography of Literature and Film that Explores "Home" by Marie Hassett, ABCD's LearningWorks
Amistad. (film)
Harriette Arnow. The Dollmaker. A hard-to-find but wonderful novel about a woman who leaves her home in Appalachia for industrial work in Detroit during WWII. A film version is available starring Jane Fonda.
Sandra Cisneros. The House on Mango Street. Broadly appealing writing.
Robert Frost. "The Death of the Hired Man." A poem that addresses issues of home.
Winifred Gallagher. The Power of Place. A discussion of behavioral and environmental science research about the ways that places affect our lives.
Lorraine Hansberry. A Raisin in the Sun. Available as a play, and in a film version starring Sidney Poitier.
Kathleen Hirsch. A Home in the Heart of the City. About Hirsch's home, Jamaica Plain, MA.
It's a Wonderful Life. (film)
Stephen King. "The Reach" A beautiful short story about a woman's life and community on a small island in Maine.
Jonathan Kozol. Amazing Grace. A bleak but powerful look at New York's poorest neighborhood.
Robert Levine. A Geography of Time. How our home culture affects our perception and use of time.
Janet McCarthy. Project Girl. An autobiography about how growing up in the projects affected one woman's sense of herself and her ability to succeed.
Gloria Naylor. The Women of Brewster Place. This is available as a book, and as a film starring Oprah Winfrey.
Gloria Naylor. Linden Hills. Naylor's examination of a middle-class black community, and the price of belonging there.
Kathleen Norris. Dakota.
Constance Perin. Belonging in America. A sociological study of American patterns of family and home culture.
Lisbeth Schor. Common Purpose. A study of programs that have helped to strengthen and rebuild families and communities.
Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass. The ultimate discussion of America as home.
The Wizard of Oz (film).
Jacqueline Woodson. The House you Pass on the Way.
William Zinsser. They Went.