This unit is designed for a third grade class at a New Haven Public School. The students in the class at L.W. Beecher Elementary School are predominantly African-American and range in age from 8-10. They come from lower to middle-class socioeconomic levels and a variety of home environments. The students are also diverse in academic levels, including students participating in the Talented and Gifted Program as well as those receiving resource services for various learning difficulties.
Teaching about diversity plays an important role in education today. Teachers everywhere are encouraged to raise students' awareness regarding diversity, especially cultural diversity, in an effort to bring people closer together. The L.W. Beecher Team will explore cultural diversity through the use of children's literature with each member focusing on a different ethnic group. My contribution to the team will be to examine the African-American culture as it is depicted in literature for young children.
Since the majority of students at L.W. Beecher School are of African-American descent, the study of African-American history and culture has always been an integral part of our Social Studies curriculum. However, because of the increasing emphasis on developing students' reading skills using more integrated approaches, I will attempt to further expand my students' awareness and understanding of their African-American culture through the use of children's literature, while also focusing on related reading and language arts skills.
Students in this age group are becoming increasingly aware of the differences of others. Therefore, it is imperative that the issue of diversity become an integral part of today's curriculums in an effort to expose students to other races, cultures, religions, and special groups such as gays and lesbians and the handicapped, for the purpose of helping them become more sensitive to others and realize that there really are more similarities than differences between individuals.
In teaching about diversity, hopefully you will increase students awareness, understanding, and appreciation of the groups they are learning about, even if that group happens to be their own. They've often learned many of the stereotypes that the majority and other minority groups may have which are the direct result of ignorance and misunderstanding. Frequently these stereotypes have been passed down from generation to generation. Destroying negative stereotypes about their group helps students feel more pride and self-respect while destroying negative stereotypes about other groups helps them gain respect for others. Providing students with knowledge about their group's achievements helps them build a more positive self-esteem. Similarly, educating them about other groups helps bridge differences and create an atmosphere for more positive interactions among individuals. It prepares them to live, learn, communicate, and work to achieve common goals in a culturally diverse world by fostering understanding, appreciation, and respect for others.
In 1987, a Social Development curriculum, Project Charlie, was introduced in the New Haven Public School System. Although diversity is not a component of our Social Development curriculum, per se, the issue of diversity certainly ties in nicely with the Project Charlie curriculum, whose main goal is to raise students' self-awareness. Project Charlie's lessons are geared towards increasing students' self-esteem, motivating them to learn, promoting positive decision-making skills, and helping them with conflict resolution in an attempt to bolster more positive exchanges with others. The Project Charlie lessons are divided into three categories: Self-Awareness, Relationships, Decision-Making, and Chemical Use. Similarly, my unit will be divided as follows: Self-Awareness, Relationships with Family, Relationships with Friends, and Relationship to/within a Community.
The aim of the Self-Awareness section will be to expose students to characters' personalities and behavior and other issues with which they can easily relate. Students in this age group are just entering a crucial stage in their development: the awkward stage prior to adolescence when self-esteem is probably at its most fragile. Therefore, books in this section will focus on raising students' self-esteem. In their book,
Building Self-Esteem in Children
, Berne and Savary define a healthy self-esteem as "a capacity to see oneself as valuable and competent, loving and lovable, having certain unique talents and a worthwhile personality to share in relationships with others." 1
The next section will deal with family relationships. Students will explore various types of family structures and relationships and also traditions similar to those celebrated in their own families. Students will learn that there is no one correct type of family but rather that families should be made up of people who love and respect each other. There are traditional families which are made up of a mother, father, and children; single-parent families; extended families in which grandparents, aunts/uncles, cousins,etc. may live with the core family,etc. A variety of relationships will be examined so all children will have something with which they can identify.
The next section, entitled "Relationships with Friends", will use children's books to examine friendships among peers, interracial and inter-religious friendships, friendships with the handicapped, and friendships with adults.
In the final section, relationships to/within one's community will be explored in an attempt to show students that they really aren't so different from other members of their culture.
I propose to develop a unit in which I will use a variety of children's books, both fiction and non-fiction, to increase students' awareness and appreciation of African-American culture and history. I have also selected collections of poems which were written to evoke feelings about their culture. This unit will focus primarily on the African-American culture as it is today,though it will also expose students to famous African-Americans in history.
This unit will be interdisciplinary in approach, lending itself to various reading, writing, history, social development, art, music, and drama activities. As a culminating activity, students will perform an adaptation of Faith Ringgold's
Dinner At Aunt Connie's House
, written by two former students, Brittney Talley and Jaala Johnson, during the 1995-1996 school year, which combines family tradition with a dose of history. A copy of the script is included with this unit. Because the play calls for girls primarily, the boys will be employed to create portraits of the famous African-American women depicted in this moving story. This unit will be developed and activities will be shared with other members of the Beecher Team throughout the 1997-1998 school year in an effort to increase students' awareness, understanding, and appreciation of other cultures besides their own.