This unit is designed for students in 7th grade English/Language Arts (ELA) classrooms in a diverse Philadelphia public K-8 school. There are three classes, with each class cycling into this ELA room for 90 minutes daily.
Rationale
This is my tenth year teaching seventh grade English/Language Arts at Greenberg Elementary School. Greenberg’s Ethnic make-up for the 2018-19 year was 48% White, 27% Asian, 11% Black/African American, 8% Hispanic/Latino, 5% Multi Racial/Other. There are dozens of languages spoken at Greenberg. The most spoken languages at Greenberg, from greatest to least, are Malayalam, Uzbek, Russian, Mandarin, Arabic, and Ukrainian. (School District of Philadelphia 2018)
Since I started teaching, I have heeded the advice of the progressive education books, magazines, and professional developments I seek out, and strove to make the literature in my classroom diverse. The novels I chose for shared reading, literature circles, and summer reading include protagonists who are African-American, Native American, Japanese American, and Jewish European. We barely read any books where the protagonist is a young American white male, as most of the books I remember reading in middle school were. I achieved my goal of making sure that, at least in my class, “white” does not equal “normal” and “male” does not equal “normal.” This is an important lesson I want to instill in all my students, especially my students who identify as white. It is an important first step in working to dismantle the underlying implicit structures of white supremacy in American Society.
My book selections always bothered me because the diversity in the characters of my books did not represent the diversity in my school. My discomfort mirrors that of teacher Jim Hiller, who wrote about his own struggle in Teaching Tolerance:“I realized in that moment that my actions didn’t support my beliefs. Daily, I professed equality to my kids, how important it was that we respect and honor people’s races and cultures. That message was unintentionally negated by my read-aloud selections” (Hiller, 2019).
Greenberg Elementary does not look like most of Philadelphia, which is primarily African American and Latinex. Though many teachers in Greenberg try to choose diverse literature for our classrooms, we usually choose books that are well known and easily available. I do not think that in eight years of schooling, my Malayali students (speakers of the language Malayalam, usually from Kerala, a southern state of India) have ever read anything in school that reflected their culture. Malayali students are the second largest ethnic group represented in Greenberg, so their culture needs to be a part of my curriculum. However, I primarily teach reading by using novels. I have found just two middle school novels where the protagonist was Indian, and neither seemed like a good fit for guided reading. Even if I found a “good fit” novel, what about the other students in my classes? There are Chinese, Vietnamese, Palestinian, Egyptian, Libyan, Puerto Rican, Uzbek, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, and more. How can I find texts so that they each see themselves in literature? How will we have the time to read that many texts?
When I began this Storytelling Traditions of South Asia and the Middle East course, I realized that not only did the content of literature in my class not celebrate the diverse culture of my school, the structures or genres of literatures did not celebrate them either. I remembered what I had learned when taking Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) courses about the importance of capitalizing on multiple literacies. “In limiting the discourse in official school contexts to monolingual, written, literary texts from the majority culture, the richness of multilingual, oral discourse, vernacular writing and literary texts from minority cultures is left outside of the school walls,” according to Hornberger & E. Skilton-Sylvester (2000, p. 105). Storytelling – broadly understood – is a genre my class is lacking. Every culture has important literary forms such as oral storytelling or story-telling through dance, song or skits. These literacies are often not valued in Western schools because they are not considered “formal” written literature. In my opinion, however, oral literacies should be brought into the classroom as a strength, not just to further goals of diversity. Teaching orality as mode of learning builds on the strengths and knowledge that students already come to school with. My class does not capitalize on the multiple literacies students may possess by just using twentieth-century novels, contemporary poetry, and retellings of Greek Mythology to teach reading and writing. This world story-telling unit will be a start towards this goal.
In the Teacher Institute of Philadelphia course I participated in, Storytelling Traditions of South Asia and the Middle East, we started off by reading excerpts from the Kathasaritsagara, “Oceans of Rivers of Stories,” which is a very long, complicated, mythological frame story involving the origin of the “Big Story,” the education of prices, and the intervention of Hindu divinities in the process of storytelling.This work includes many mature subjects. My Indian students are Christian, and many come from very religious families. They speak Malayalam, not Hindi, the national language of India. I realized that India is a vast web of cultures and traditions and I needed to develop some cultural competency in this area. I did some background reading on the history of the Malayali language, Malayalam literature, and the history of the state of Kerala. Then I decided to ask the experts themselves. I held a short focus group with all students of Indian descent in one of my three classes. There were five to seven students in the group. I told them about my class and asked them if they learned any myths or folktales when they were young. They were very excited at being asked and my interest in their culture. However, they said no, they were not familiar with some of the stories I was telling them. They mostly learned Bible stories in their families. Then two of them remembered that there is festival in the Fall, known as the Onam Festival, that all the people of Kerala celebrate, which has a legend associated with it. I immediately started doing research on this festival.
The Onam Festival is a harvest festival that takes place over ten days in the beginning of the first month of the Malayalam calendar, which falls in August or September. In 2019, Onam will start on September 11th. The legend behind Onam is the story of King Mahabali. It is a Hindu myth, involving the god Vishnu that explains how Kerala came to be. The story ends with King Mahabali having to leave earth, but he gets to return to Kerala one day a year known as Onam. To celebrate Onam there are sports competitions, traditional dance, reenactment of folktales, a snake boat race, the weaving and presentation of intricate floral carpets called Pookalam, an Elephant procession, and a nine-course feast called Onasadya, with eleven to thirteen essential dishes. Though the legend of King Mahabali is a Hindu myth, Onam is a secular holiday that brings together people of different religions and castes to celebrate Kerala. This festival really excites me. It will fall right when I am teaching this unit. I plan to start with a one-day mini Onam festival (“Onam Festival,” 2015).
After starting my research on Onam, I have been corresponding weekly about the Onam festival with one of my students in her journal. She has given me more information about how it is celebrated by Indian communities in American and has given me ideas about how we could celebrate it in the classroom. She is excited to come back to my class next year to help me celebrate the festival. The student told me about the traditional dance that is performed at the Onam festival. Several of my students study a type of Indian dance. I hope to have these students perform the dance next year. I hope this can start a trend of having mini celebrations for different holidays celebrated by the different cultures in Greenberg such as Eid and Chinese New Year.
During our mini Onam Festival, I will do a first telling of the legend of King Mahabali to kick off the unit. Though the story of King Mahabali is considered a myth (and I did find books of Indian and Chinese myths for children), I decided that it would be way too complicated to read the mythologies of several different cultures in a short unit. I decided that, with the exception of the King Mahabali myth for Onam, the texts for the unit would be folktales. According to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, a folktale is, “a characteristically anonymous, timeless, and placeless tale circulated orally among a people” (2019). In the article, “Using Folktales for Language Teaching,” Soe Marlar Lwin defines folktales as, “a traditional story that has been passed on by word of mouth before writing systems were developed” (Lwin, 2015, 75). Oral stories, such as folktales, are a unique form of literature and offer an interesting way to learn about a culture. Because folktales were told and retold before being transcribed, always changing slightly, they, “express the wishes, hopes, and fears of many people, rather than the concerns of just one writer” (Cole, 1982, xvii). Also, folktales served and continue to serve as not only entertainment, but also cultural transmissions to pass on important values and wisdom to the next generation. The idea of stories as a form of cultural transmission seems to be so central to the art of storytelling, and so universal, that I decided it needed to be a key understanding objective in this unit.
I learned from researching folktales that the Brothers Grimm were one of the first to dedicate themselves to transcribing tales of native storytellers. Their work spread to scholars in other countries in Europe, and then throughout the world, transcribing and preserving folktales and other folk literature. Comparisons of folktales began to be made and it was obvious that there were great similarities in stories from around the world. Two theories emerged as to why there are such similar themes in folktales of different cultures. One is that plots originated in India and gradually spread and adopted throughout the world through trade and travel. The other theory was that the folktales all developed separately, but the themes of the stories are all universal, and so it is natural for many different cultures to have stories on these same themes. Most folklorists today believe these two theories are both true. After discussing the cross cultural themes and motifs of storytelling in the TIP course and researching more about this phenomenon specifically in folktales, I decided that identifying the common themes and motifs should be another objective of the unit. This blends with my previous objective because often these themes are a part of the cultural transmission (Cole, 1982).
Based on my research, I identified two major unit objectives for this unit:
- Students will be able to identify common tropes in and purposes of classic stories in order to compare stories of another cultural tradition.
- Students will be able to analyze the cultural transmission of a story in order to create a story as a form of cultural transmission.
When speaking with Professor Deven Patel about these objectives, Dr. Patel asked what the purpose of finding the similarities in the story would be. He was urging me to have students look for the why. Why do cultures develop and tell stories? What function do different types of stories play? We thought about these questions often in class as we analyzed stories. Deven suggested modeling different analyses of a story for the students, such as a surface analysis, which would couple linguistic analysis with a study of patterns and repetitions, and a deep-structure analysis that would look for how the various surface meanings feed into a broader system of significance. In other words, we were encouraged to move from the “what” to pull out the “why” of the story.
In class we often talked about the purposes of stories. Many stories are told as means of dealing with moral, political, and psychological issues. For example, the Indian Epic Mahabharata, from the time of approximately 1000-200 BCE, breaks all social norms. It has characters behaving the opposite of what is considered socially acceptable and chronicles a war started because of the breakdown of social norms. This text is thought to show anxieties people held in their time and region. However, the epic contains the theme of revenge, which is a common theme among cultures, showing that peoples of different cultures and geographic regions are often wrestling with the same problems (Satyamurti, 2016).
Storytellers can work out issues in stories and often use animal characters to do things that people feel uneasy about. An example of this is the Panchatantra (The Five Strategems), which was written in 200 BCE, but is composed of tales developed orally in India from 1500 to 500 BCE. It is a frame story, in which a man turns his three dull-witted sons over to a scholar who promises to make them wise in one year. He does this by telling them twenty-two stories, most of which have animal characters. A frame story has one overarching narrative, but has one or more other stories told within it. While these twenty-two stories may seem like childrens stories, many contain trickery and betrayal that involve the animals killing and eating each other. Scholars have analyzed the animals to show that they symbolize different human traits and are meant to represent different humans behaving differently. In our TIP class, we as a group also discussed the animals and what types of humans they symbolized. This is an exercise that could be done with younger students and animal tales (though not the original version of the Panchatantra, as we decided it was not meant for children) (Olivelle, 1997). Another animal-related story we read and discussed in detail was The Conference of the Birds. This epic poem from the Persian Sufi poet Fari un-din Attar in the 13th century AD, is also a frame story involving animals. Each of the thirty birds represents a moral failing of humans. Each quest is a lesson. This story serves as cultural transmission to teach the most important tenants of Sufism through allegory. However, there is also much hidden commentary on the religious and social politics of the day (Fari un-din Attar, 1984). The Panchatantra and The Conference of the Birds are just two examples of stories that had duel purposes. They served to deal with the issues of the time and to teach important cultural knowledge from one generation to the next. Through these stories and many others, we learned in class to discuss and determine the purposes of stories by looking at structure and content. Though I do not think either of these texts would be a good fit for my unit, the discussions we had in class surrounding these texts inform the kinds of critical thinking I want my students to be doing about stories in my unit. This led me to add the major content objective:
- Students will be able to compare and contrast similar stories of different cultural traditions in order to analyze and argue the purposes of stories.
When I began planning this unit, I further researched the benefits of specifically using folktales to teach literacy. I found the most robust research in using folktales to teach literacy to English Language Learners (ELLs). I have several ELLs in each class, and being trained in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL), I find that TESOL strategies often greatly aid students who have difficulty reading in comprehension and in accessing the curriculum. Oral tales usually have simple forms of language and straightforward beginnings, middles, and ends, which appeal to children. However, the psychological and moral themes and issues dealt with in folktales are important to all ages and cultures. According to Lwin in “Using Folktales for Language Teaching”, Folktales from across the world have a similarity in event sequences, which make them an excellent tool for language learning. I believe this conclusion can be extended, that the structure of folktales will make them an excellent tool for increasing reading comprehension. Lwin also posits that the familiar moral themes as well as the familiar narrative structures are a motivation factor for ELLs, and I believe they can be a motivation factor for all students. Folktales can be a tool to explore language and culture simultaneously. To do this, Lwin suggests using questioning targeted at helping students recognize the relationships between language and culture, so that students will come to the conclusion that, “Language, as a system for organizing the experience of people, emphasizes whatever is prevalent or important to the culture of the people” (Lwin, 2015, p.79). I intend to make this understanding an objective in my unit plan as it furthers my goals of comprehension, analysis, and cultural understanding. Lwin gives examples of asking, “Why do you think?” questions for the food, animals, and motifs chosen in particular story to make students aware that stories can show what is unique to people of a particular cultural group and geographic region. One example of a question I would like to emulate in my unit is, “What do you think gold and its colour (as in ‘gold feather’ ‘gold ladder’ and ‘gold plate’) symbolize for the people and culture in which this tale originated?” (Lwin, 2015, p.79) I intend to use Lwin’s strategy of targeted questions about the links between language and culture in my close reading lessons and possibly find a way to incorporate it into graphic organizers students will use in cooperative learning when they are all reading different folktales.
Studying different tales with similar themes and subjects, such as trickster tales, can motivate students to develop claims and justify them with text based evidence. Lwin states this is one of the aims of language learning, but is also a very large part of the common core academic standards in English/Language arts. Lwin explains that discussion around the trickster tales bring out the different ideas and beliefs students from different cultures have about trickery, wits, and wisdom. Once students develop a claim based on these ideas and justify them using the texts, first orally and then in writing, they can compare and analyze their responses. I plan to incorporate Lwin’s strategy into this unit by having students read different tales on the same themes, and analyzing them through discussion and writing. The current way the School District of Philadelphia wants middle school students to practice written analysis is through a text dependent analysis. Since this unit will start off the year, I may model writing a text dependent analysis on a theme in the stories, such as trickery.
In “The Power of Story: Using Storytelling to Improve Literacy Learning”, Miller and Pennycuff explore the benefits of oral storytelling to reading and writing development. Research shows that the active engagement achieved through storytelling as a teaching strategy helps students develop a sense of story. Having a sense of story is having an awareness of the components of a story. It is important for developing reading comprehension because it helps students makes sense of the text and extract meaning from a story. The article cites several comprehension skills, such as prediction making and awareness of cause and effect, and literary elements, such as point of view, plot, characters, setting, and theme, that developing a sense of story aids in developing. When students watch storytelling techniques such as intonation and facial expressions being used, they will often try to practice these techniques when it is their turn to retell stories. Relating stories with expression will aid in their development in comprehension. This made me realize that I need to be sure to use storytelling techniques when reading the folktales to my students as short reading. I should draw the students’ attention to these techniques beforehand and ask them about the techniques and their purpose afterwards. Then, oral story telling should be a task students are required to accomplish. Students should practice telling folktales they have read with intonation and facial expression (2008).
In writing, Miller and Pennycuff show having students focus on the telling of the story first can aid in their writing because they most likely have much more experience telling stories than writing them, thereby engaging them them by allowing them to do something they are already good at. It also shifts the power from the teacher to the student, making the learning, “inherently more meaningful for students because the stories belong to them (Miller & Pennycuff, 2008, p. 40) Using storytelling as prewriting also helps students organize their stories. Researchers found that, not only does having middles school students use storytelling as prewriting improve their narrative writing, but also students can transfer these narrative writing skills to more analytical forms of writing. Therefore, in the final part of the unit, when students write their own folktale, there needs to be an oral storytelling component of the prewriting process.
The unit will start with celebration of the festival of Onam. On this day, the class will start with t a write-pair share of the journal entry, “Tell a story you know that is associated with a holiday you celebrate.” I will give a brief overview of what the holiday is and then how it is celebrated in Kerela. I will show pictures of the parades, flower art, and feasts. I will show Kerela on a map of India. My former students will dance and talk about how they celebrate Onam in America with their families and friends. We will eat popular Indian snack foods for our “feast”. Then I will ask students about stories behind holidays and pull out that most holidays whether, religious, cultural, or national have stories behind them. I will end with telling the King Mahabali myth, modeling the story-telling techniques of intonation and gesture. I will conclude with having students turn and talk to summarize the myth and answer what they think the purpose of the story was.
The next lesson will be a whole class overview of different types of storytelling, its history, and purposes. On this day, the class will start with a write-pair share of the journal entry, “Why do people tell stories? Why do people like stories? Who has told stories to you in your life?” I will talk about the history of oral storytelling, their travel around the world, and how the brothers Grimm started transcribing and comparing stories. We will talk about different types of stories such as myths, legends, fables, and fairy tales. I will also have to go over some terminology such as symbol, motif, trope, theme, and frame story.
In the next one to three lessons, we will do a close-reading and annotation of the King Mahabali myth and two other Indian folktales. With the King Mahabali myth I will be employing a think-aloud to analyze the myth for language, structure, purposes, motifs, themes, and cultural transmission. With the other two stories, I will get more and more ideas from the students, making the analyzing process more of a class discussion. We will fill out the Reading Folktales Graphic Organizer after we read each tale.
In the next two to three classes, students will work in cooperative learning groups. Each group will do close readings of three folktales from a different geographic location. There will be a trickster tale, a quest tale, and a magic tale in each group. Students will discuss the folktales and fill out the Reading Folktales Graphic Organizer after they read each tale. Each student will pick one of the folktales to become an expert on. They will practice telling a folktale aloud and discussing their finding on this tale.
Students will Jigsaw in the next one to two lessons. Students will now be grouped by the type of tale they chose to be the expert on (trickster tales, quest tales, and magic tales). Each student will take turns telling their story to the group and sharing a summary of their analysis on it. Then each group will fill out the Comparing Folktales graphic organizer in order to think about and discuss the similarities and differences. Final questions on the graphic organizer will guide students to think about and discuss the purposes of stories and about the similarities and differences between life in these different places.
Before moving on, we will have a whole class discussion of what we learned from the reading and jigsaw experience. We will discuss the common motifs and themes we found and propose reasons for these commonalities. We will expand on this to discuss what the language and themes teach us about the uniqueness and universality of the cultures.
Students will write a short folktale as a culminating performance assessment. On the first day of the performance assessment, the class will start with a write-pair share of the journal entry, “What is a life lesson that you would want to teach your children? How could you tell that in a story?” We will discuss this at length for students to get ideas. Then I will model filling out the prewriting graphic organizer using think aloud techniques.
The next day students will get into cooperative learning groups. Students will use oral storytelling as a prewriting technique, using their prewriting graphic organizers as guides. Students will elicit feedback from their group members using the questions on the back of the prewriting graphic organizer and write the feedback on the back of the prewriting graphic organizer.
Students will take two to three days to draft their stories, proofread their stories, and write a final copy of their stories.
In the final lesson of the unit, students present their finished folktale orally to others. Then students will complete self-reflections and group assessments. I will compile the students’ folktales into a book to be kept in my classroom library.
Major Unit Objectives:
- Students will be able to identify common tropes in and purposes of classic stories in order to compare stories of another cultural tradition.
- Students will be able to analyze the cultural transmission of a story in order to create a story as a form of cultural transmission.
- Students will be able to compare and contrast similar stories of different cultural traditions in order to analyze and argue the purposes of stories.
