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Lesson Plans

September 8, 2006

Lesson Plan: Laviera’s Bilingual “AmeRíca”

September 08th 2006 Posted to Teaching Immigration Issues, Lesson Plans, English 104A, Latino / Latina American, Literature, Film, Music Recordings

Assigned Reading:
“AmerRícan” by Tato Laviera

american.jpgDiscussion Questions:
1.La Bomba and La Plena: The influence of music on Laviera’s poetry.
In “AmeRícan” Laviera makes several references to traditional Puerto Rican music. He mentions the composer Pedro Flores (13), “sweet soft spanish danzas gypsies” (15), “beating jíbaro” (18) and “walking plena-rhythms in new york” (32).

Watch the film clip of Los Pleneros de los 21 playing “Testigo” at the Smithsband_photo_2005.jpgonian Folk Folklife Festival, 2005. Also watch Los Pleneros’ demonstration of how the drums are played in Plena music. Los Pleneros de los 21 are a New York-based music group that plays Bomba and Plena, two African-based music styles that have flourished among the black communities of Puerto Rico proper and American Puerto Rican neighborhoods. Bomba and Plena are the result of the blending of various influences, including West African music, European music and Native Taino music. (Read the article)

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September 5, 2006

Lesson Plan: Using/Misusing the Black Vernacular: Hurston, Hughes and Toomer

September 05th 2006 Posted to Lesson Plans, English 104A, African American, Literature

untitled-harvest-jules-smith.jpeg“But now, the sun and the bossmen were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.”
–Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Assigned Readings:
(From The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Ed. Paul Lauter, 5th Ed., 2005):
“Sweat” by Zora Neale Hurston
“The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes
“Blood Burning Moon” from Cane by Jean Toomer

Background:
One of the most striking qualities of Hurston’s prose is her use of the black vernacular. In Hurston’s novels and short stories it is often the dialogue and not the narration that drives the story forward. Consider the following passage from “Sweat”: (Read the article)

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September 1, 2006

Lesson Plan: “The Weary Blues”: Langston Hughes and Bessie Smith

September 01st 2006 Posted to Lesson Plans, English 104A, African American, Literature, Music Recordings

“The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes
weary-blues.jpgLangston Hughes was one of the first of the Harlem Renaissance poets to incorporate jazz, spirituals and the blues into his writing. In the 1920’s Hughes steeped himself in the jazz culture of Harlem and began to weave the rhythm and feeling of Harlem jazz into his poetry. Perhaps the most obvious example of Hughes’ experimentation with new musical forms appears Hughes’ poem “The Weary Blues,” published first in 1923 in New York’s Amsterdam News and two years later in Hughes’ first collection The Weary Blues. (Read the article)

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August 30, 2006

Lesson Plan:Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.

August 30th 2006 Posted to Teaching Immigration Issues, UCSB Courses, Lesson Plans, English 104A, Latino / Latina American, Literature, Biography

borderlands-book.jpgAnzaldúa’s book is theoretical, political, poetical, and personal. Writing about external, communal, and individual borderlands from a position on, around, and between those borders, Anzaldúa subversively advocates a political mobilization around the “mestiza consciousness,” for only multiplicity—internal as well as external—can break down the “subject-object duality that keeps her [one] a prisoner” (80). Anzaldúa identifies herself as a Chicana lesbian feminist from the tejas-Mexican border, and she writes of the contradictions and coalitions she must negotiate between these multiple identities. Her gender and sexuality, for example, are at odds with patriarchal culture, but she inhabits these contradictory positions tactically. (Read the article)

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August 28, 2006

Maria Full of Grace (Maria llena eres de gracia) (2004)

August 28th 2006 Posted to Teaching Immigration Issues, Lesson Plans, English 104A, Latino / Latina American, Film

maria-full-of-grace.jpgWinner of the Dramatic Audience Award at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival and two major awards at the Berlin Film Festival, Maria Full of Grace is one young woman’s journey from a small Colombian town to the streets of New York. A bright, spirited 17-year old, Maria Alvarez (Catalina Sandino Moreno) lives with three generations of her family in a cramped house in rural Colombia and works stripping thorns from flowers in a rose plantation. The offer of a lucrative job involving travel—in fact, becoming a drug “mule”—changes the course of her life. Far from the uneventful trip she is promised, Maria is transported into the risky and ruthless world of international drug trafficking. Her mission becomes one of determination and survival and she finally emerges with the grace that will carry her forward into a new life. Directed by Joshua Marston. In Spanish, with English sub-titles. An HBO films / Fine Line Features release.

From: “Synopsis,” HBO Films / Fine Line Features. http://www.mariafullofgrace.com/index.html (Read the article)

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August 22, 2006

Lesson Plan: “Lullaby” by Leslie Marmon Silko

August 22nd 2006 Posted to Lesson Plans, English 104A, Native American, Literature

Background:

storyteller_2.jpg“Lullaby” is a short story from Silko’s 1981 novel Storyteller. As Linda Krumholtz writes,

“Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller is a collection of stories that is also a highly self-conscious consideration of the process of storytelling, an exploration into the ways the Laguna Pueblo society creates meaning and, subsequently, the ways cultures in general create meaning. Storyteller is a distinctively ‘readerly’ text: the many stories, poems, and photographs are gathered into an apparently random ‘scrapbook’ form, and it is left to the reader to construct connections between them. Storyteller is also a multicultural or cross-cultural text in which European-style short stories and traditional Laguna stories, ‘realistic’ fictional characters, traditional characters (such as Yellow Woman, Coyote, and Spiderwoman), and Silko’s family members are all brought together… (Read the article)

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August 18, 2006

Lesson Plan: Angel Island Poems

August 18th 2006 Posted to Teaching Immigration Issues, Lesson Plans, English 104A, English 50, Asian American

angel-island-detainees-web.jpgThe following are some questions about the Angel Island poems that an instructor or TA could use to prompt class discussion. One approach I recommend is to have students form small groups and come up with answers which they then share with the class. Alternatively, you could focus one whole class around one of these questions. For example, I ran a 45 minute class discussion on the “Line between graffiti and art” question by bringing in photocopies of images from the graffiti websites and getting students to debate whether or not they thought those images were art. (Read the article)

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August 28, 2005

Defining Race and Pedagogy

August 28th 2005 Posted to Teaching Immigration Issues, UCSB Courses, Lesson Plans, Syllabi, English 104A, Writing 2, English 197, English 10AC, English 165HR, English 50, English 103A, External Resources for Teachers, Specific U.S. Racial Groups, African American, Asian American, Latino / Latina American, Native American, Type of Resource, Literature, Film, Photographs, Visual Art / Posters, Music Recordings, Maps, Recordings of Speeches, Legal Documents, Panels and Lectures, Biography, Other

Although these terms are often used as though they signified clear and well-bounded meanings, both words have complex histories and implications that are frequently only discernable once one considers the contexts in which they are used. For the purposes of this site, we offer the following definitions: (Read the article)

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