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English 104A

August 23, 2006

Langston Hughes Web Resources

August 23rd 2006 Posted to English 104A, External Resources for Teachers, African American

Modern American Poetry Site
This site, edited by Cary Nelson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It is a an online companion to the Anthology of Modern American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2000). It includes a biography, criticism and several of Hughes’ poems and writings.

The Academy of American Poets
This site includes a biography, several of Hughes’ poems and related prose.

Yale New Haven Teachers Institute Curriculum Unit
This curriculum unit, compiled by G. Casey Cassidy, includes an extensive biography and a long bibliography (both for teachers and students), but includes only a few suggested in-class activities. It is geared towards grades 7-12.

Internet School Library Media Center
This is a teacher resource file for the Langston Hughes. It includes biographies, lesson plans and useful links.

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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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Leslie Marmon Silko

August 22nd 2006 Posted to English 104A, Native American, Biography

“It’ssilkolesliemarmon.jpg stories that make this a community,” Leslie Marmon Silko has remarked about the Native American world of the Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico, in which she grew up, and in five books—Laguna Women (1974), Ceremony (1977), Storyteller (1981), Almanac of the Dead (1991), and Yellow Woman (1993)—she has told and retold the tales that, she believes, make her people who they are. Of mixed Native American, Mexican, and Caucasian descent, Leslie Marmon attended Bureau of Indian Affairs schools at Laguna until entering high school, then studied at the University of New Mexico and later matriculated in law school before deciding to do graduate work in English and devote herself to a literary career. Divorced from John Silko, she has taught at Navajo Community College in Arizona and at the University of New Mexico, is the mother of two sons, and has been the recent recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. Her ceremonial impulse to tell stories that are both self-defining and celebratory of her community has issued in an art that employs many forms: poetry, short stories, legendary tales, a novel, and most recently, film scripts.

From: The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Ed. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. 2nd Ed. New York: Norton & Co., 1985. 2327-8 (Read the article)

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Harlem Renaissance Web Resources

August 22nd 2006 Posted to English 104A, External Resources for Teachers, African American

Harlem: 1900-1940. An Exhibition Portfolio from The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.
This aesthetically appealing site provides lesson plans focused around the “Harlem: 1900-1940” photo exhibition at the Schomburg Center. Lessons are geared towards middle or high-school age students, although this material could also supplement a college-level course. In addition to teacher resources, this site also provides and overview of the photo exhibition, including historical material on each photo displayed.

“Rhapsodies in Black” Art Exhibition and Book
This site includes photos from “Rhapsodies in Black” a traveling art exhibition designed by Richard J. Powell and David A. Bailey that toured London, the University of Warwick, Bristol, San Francisco and Washington D.C. in 1997-1998. The site also features selections from scholarly articles in the exhibition’s accompanying book. There is excellent material here on the art, music and culture of the Harlem Renaissance.

Yale-New Haven Teachers Institue Harlem Renaissance Unit (Gr.9-12)
This is a curriculum guide for a 9 week high school English unit on the Harlem Renaissance. It was designed by Caroline Jackson who works for the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. It includes an excellent historical background, a sequence of lessons, a student reading list and a bibliography for teachers.

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August 21, 2006

Langston Hughes

August 21st 2006 Posted to English 104A, African American, Biography

A prohughes3.jpglific poet, novelist, essayist and playwright, James Langston Hughes was a seminal figure of the Harlem Renaissance, a period during the 1920s of unprecedented artistic and intellectual achievement among black Americans. Hughes integrated the rhythm and mood of jazz and blues music into his work and used colloquial language to reflect working-class African American culture. His often-bestowed title of the “Poet Laureate of the Negro Race” reflects the extent to which Hughes’ career both shaped and was shaped by the music, art and lifestyle of black Harlem during the 1920s and ’30s. Unlike many of his fellow Harlem Renaissance writers, Hughes continued to write into the 1950’s. He died in New York City May 22, 1967. (Read the article)

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August 18, 2006

Gertrude Stein

August 18th 2006 Posted to English 104A, Biography

Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an avant-garde German-American poet, playwrstein-1935.jpgight, feminist and avid art collector. In the 1920’s her salon at 24 Rue de Fleurus in Paris became a meeting place for artists and expatriate writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Henri Matisse, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson, and Guillaume Apollinaire. She wrote her self-proclaimed masterpiece, the 1000-page The Making of Americans, from 1906 to 1911, but it wasn’t published until 1925. This novel loosely follows the history of an immigrant family over several generations. Raised in German-American family herself, Stein offers a unique perspective on what it means to be an American while simultaneously pushing the rules of English grammar and the form of the novel to their limits. (Read the article)

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Angel Island Web Resources

August 18th 2006 Posted to Teaching Immigration Issues, English 104A, English 50, External Resources for Teachers, Asian American

KQED Education Initiatives Organization Website
This multimedia site includes lesson plans, a movie about the island, sound clips of poems and photos.

Angel Island Organization
This site, which is associated with the California Department of Parks and Recreation, includes a history of the island, photos and an Angel Island Webcam.

Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation (AIISF)
This site includes historical background, phots and information about how to get involved with the foundation.

Oral History Site by Lydia Lum
This site, created by Lydia Lum, is an ongoing oral history project collected from former Angel Island detainees. It includes photos and interviews.

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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 11, 2006

Angel Island Poems

August 11th 2006 Posted to English 104A, English 50, Asian American, Literature, Film

Historical Background
The Angel Island Poems are a group of more than 135 poems written by ChiMens Barracks, Immigration Station.jpgnese immigrants detained between the years of 1910 and 1930 at the immigration detention center on Angel Island, located in the San Francisco bay (Lai 8). The poems were discovered in 1970 by park ranger Alexander Weiss who noticed the calligraphy on the walls of the abandoned detention center. Through Weiss’s efforts along with those of Paul Chow and the Angel Island Immigration Station Historical Advisory Committee (AIISHAC), the dilapidated barracks was saved from demolition and special legislation was passed granting $250,000 to preserve and restore the barracks (“Immigration Station”). Written mostly by Cantonese villagers trying to immigrate to the United States, these poems express the hope, despair and frustration of detainees awaiting the outcomes of medical examinations and immigration paperwork. (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 17bf

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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