Concept For Unit Plan

It's my goal to create a unit plan that is both educational and engaging for midlevel students.  In order to do this, I believe that the students must be able to see how the activities are relevant to their lives or applicable to future learning.  My unit plan will focus on looking at famous works rewritten or in different forms. (For example the film Gnomeo and Juliet).  Students will read the original work and then be exposed to the work being presented in a different way.  It makes students consider the question what is literature?  The unit exposes students to the diversity of literature and different interpretations of the same work.

Why is looking at diverse interpretations of text important?  It shows students that texts are malleable and open to interpretation.  Students will also be introduced to creativity within language arts and gets them thinking about how texts can be transformed.

At the end of the unit, students will have to reformat a piece of literature themselves.  For example, making a song out of Romeo and Juliet.  Doing so will foster a deeper understanding of the text and encourages active reading and analysis of texts.

An example of students making a creative summary of the Harry Potter series:

Critical Literacy

The middle school years are critical years (pun intended) for teaching critical literacy.  At this age, students are beginning to develop an ability to analyze texts in greater depth, and it is essential that students realize that there is not only one way to analyze a text.  Also, students should be taught to seek information from multiple sources in order to gain a better perspective on a text, event, or time period.

Adolescents often have opinions that are based off of how they are raised, their family, and their friends-Their opinions tend to be narrow-minded and tend not to result from much analysis.  Critical literacy exposes adolescent students to more opinions and views, and provides them with new methods for analysis.  It teaches them how to think and thus form their own opinions instead of opinions that are handed to them by others.

Teaching critical literacy at the middle school age also prepares students for analysis of texts at higher levels (high school and college), so that they will have a head start and be able to jump into more complex analyses more quickly.  Analyzing texts from multiple lenses also provides students with framework for writing persuasive essays and research papers because they are provided with a wider fact base.  Therefore, critical literacy also helps students to become better writers.

Thus, critical literacy can play multiple roles in the middle school classroom:
-Teach students that there is more than one way to analyze a text.
-Provide students with a way of constructing more informed/educated opinions and arguments.
-A gateway for richer text analysis.
-A way to enhance student writing.