Context

The students who inspired this unit are 9th graders attending Science Leadership Academy at Beeber. This is a criterion-based district school that is based on the core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation, and reflection. The majority of our learning community are students of color, some of whom are bilingual or emerging multilingual. In my ongoing effort toward culturally and historically appropriate pedagogy, I endeavor to create units that highlight the cultural and linguistic diversity of our students. The goal of this unit is to celebrate our students’ identities and culture by assuming a biliteracy stance–that is, I encourage all learners to incorporate their home languages and vernacular into their writing and speaking, which underscores a respect for all students’ backgrounds and enriches our collective learning.

Rationale

This unit will expand my teaching of Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone, by supplementing the anchor text with contemporary fiction in order to underscore its relevance for 9th grade students. Students will make connections between Antigone, Mexican refugees in Uribe’s Antígona González, and Syrian refugees who performed Sophocles’ tragedy in Lebanon. I will provide students with diverse texts–poetry, ancient Greek drama, fiction, and informational–for the purpose of deepening their understanding of the play and centering marginalized voices from immigrant and refugee communities.

I am expanding this multi-genre unit that centers around Sophocles’ Antigone to include contemporary texts that parallel social injustices. Students will read poetry written by poets about the immigrant and refugee experience. Students will read Uribe’s Antígona González, a poetic prose reimagining of Sophocles’ Greek tragedy in Mexico. The intent is for students to consider how a fifth-century play continues to resonate in the twenty-first century. This pairing is intended to underscore the relevance of Antigone in contemporary society, specifically with respect to migrants disappearing and dying in the vicinity of the U.S./Mexico border. Additionally, students will read supplemental informational texts in order to make connections between Antigone and present-day communities including an article about Syrian women refugees who performed Antigone in Beirut, Lebanon.

Throughout this drama/poetry unit, my ninth-grade students read chorally, compose original odes (after the Chorus in Antigone), write in response to poetry, poetic prose, and drama, consider their heroes–past and present, real and fictional–and write collaboratively. Students compose one act plays that will include a monologue from the perspective of a character in their group’s original play. In order to highlight the immigrant experience into this unit, an extension of this writing project will be to have multilingual students translate an excerpt of their play or monologue into their home language.

This unit by design should open up multiple perspectives for students across cultures and languages, revealing our flawed, collective humanity. Like Antigona searching for the body of her brother, Tadeo, another character in Antígona González (2016) reflects, “I am Sandra Munoz, but I am also Sara Uribe and we want to name the voices behind the stories that take place here” (Uribe). As a teacher, I accept that invitation and challenge to create space for our students to realize their agency that comes through the written and spoken word by seeing themselves as poets and playwrights.

The Language Arts objectives of this unit are to have 9th grade students develop their reading and writing skills through reading, analyzing, and composing poetry, poetic prose, drama, and writing about informational text. Ninth grade students at SLA Beeber begin this unit with our core value of inquiry (via the essential questions as well as the questions that they pose about the poems, verse novel, and Greek drama), read across genres, and collaborate in order to compose an original one act play for their benchmark project., which is how SLAB refers to summative projects and assessments.

The 9th grade essentials questions are: Who am I? How do I interact with the environment? How does my environment affect me? Our topical essential questions to consider during our reading of Sophocles’ Antigone are: What makes a hero? What lessons do we learn from a tragedy? What is an individual’s responsibility to oneself, one’s family, and one’s country? Can devotion be a crime?

The summative assessment after reading Antigone and Antígona González, is that students will collaborate to write an original one act play. The prompts I offer students to consider are as follows: In a sequel to Antigone, What happens to Ismene? What happens to Kreon? Will you write a play about a hero or a tragic hero? Will you write a play about a social justice topic or an act of civil disobedience? Pick up where Uribe’s Antígona González ends: “Me ayudaras a levantar el cadaver? Will you join me in taking up the body?” Should we always do what is legal or what is right? All are poignant queries that ignite students’ imaginations.

Genre study: POETRY

Text: Ink Knows No Borders

Poetry will be the entry point into this unit, which complements both Sophocles’ Antigone and Uribe’s verse novel. The introduction to Ink Knows No Borders offers poignant epigraphs that I may use as quick writing prompts. The anthology opens with Asghar’s query, “america, am I not your refugee?” (2019, p. XV).

In a more in-depth poetry analysis, students will collaborate in pairs/groups to select one of the following poems (listed in below) from this anthology to read, analyze, and present.

Lesson: Reading and writing poetry

Lesson: Reading and writing poetry collaboratively–The Ghazal

“I’ll do what I must if I’m bold in real time.

A refugee, I’ll be paroled in real time.” –Agha Shahid Ali

Genre study: INFORMATIONAL TEXT 

Text: The tragedy giving hope to Syria’s women – BBC News

Students will read the article, “The tragedy giving hope to Syria’s women” in order to see how Antigone is still being performed today, specifically as a vehicle of social justice.

Students will annotate the article using Muhammad’s five pursuits: identity, skills,

intellect, criticality, and joy. Here are the guiding questions from Cultivating Genius:

Students will write about this piece of informational text using “They say/I say” format (2014, Graff & Birkenstein). I learned about this book during the PhilWP summer institute and have used it ever since. Although it provides templates, which by design are formulaic, the goal is to have students internalize the moves writers make when responding to a text. Here is the graphic organizer I provide students with that is adapted from templates in the book. The goal is for students to compose a two-paragraph response. In “they say” students identify the author’s claim and supporting details and cite text evidence that is connected to the claim followed by commentary. In paragraph two, “I say,” students respond to the text from their perspective. If the article contains an arguable claim they may agree, disagree, or somewhat agree with the author. In the case of this article about Syrian refugee women performing Antigone in Lebanon, they will share their thoughts about the event, make connections, and write about what strikes them as interesting, important, confusing, etc.

Finally, I will have students research to find a recent article from a credible source about immigration, refugees, etc. Perhaps they will share their findings in a mini-presentation or find an article with a partner. Links to all student-selected articles will be shared so that they will be able to read and respond to an additional article. The goal of this unit is to have students read across genres–poetry, verse novel, myth/Greek drama, and informational text–and be exposed to strong female protagonists who are searching for justice and who will not cease despite impediments on their journey. We will circle back to our 9th grade overarching essential questions: Who am I? How do I interact with the environment? How does my environment affect me? And also reconsider our EQs for this unit: What makes a hero? What lessons does one learn from a tragedy? What is our responsibility to ourselves, our family, our country?

Uribe begins, “I want to name the voices behind the stories that take place here” (9) and ends Antígona González with the plural: “We want to name the voices behind the stories that take place here” (167). Just as tragedy comes full circle, the individual becomes the collective. By reading these texts–ancient and contemporary–we, students and teachers, learn how to see and hear ourselves in these resonant voices.

Lesson: Reading Informational Text The tragedy giving hope to Syria’s women – BBC News

Genre study: THE VERSE NOVEL 

Text: Uribe’s Antígona González

The author, Sara Uribe, in “Antígona González: Thinking Through Language, the Body, Writing, and Translation in the Present,” (2019) summarizes the intention behind her verse novel: “[to] imagine alternative ways of writing that insist on representing the 37,000 bodies that are missing [in Mexico].” The reasons students will read her work is to learn about multiple, diverse perspectives from a culture other than their own, to appreciate the retelling of Antigone through the genre of poetic prose that fictionalizes real events, and to make text-to-text connections to Sophocles’ tragedy to which Uribe alludes.

To open our reading of Antígona González and Antigone, students will collaborate on the Question Formulation Technique (2011). I will use maps of the settings of the texts– Tamaulipas, Mexico, and Thebes, Greece–as the QFocus. Implementing the QFT as a pre-reading technique seems to work well. The students will generate questions about these places in anticipation of reading the contemporary verse novel and the ancient drama, which leads them to make connections between the works of Uribe and Sophocles from the start.

Next, Students will read aloud excerpted poems from Uribe’s verse novel in Spanish and in English. Her text offers a side-by-side translation. If students have a home language, they may translate one of the verses as well.

An extension of composing an original ode is to have students create side by side translations of their praise poems a la Uribe’s verse novel, Antígona González. They may translate their poem into their home language or another language that they know, into Spanish, which all 9th graders take, or write formal and informal versions of their odes.

Genre study: ANCIENT GREEK DRAMA 

Text: Sophocles’ Antigone

I will implement drama practices including tableaus, and two new techniques that I learned in this course: conscience alley and writing in role. I will implement “Conscience alley” (See Drama Strategies) with students during our reading of Antigone. It is described as follows: “Participants form two lines representing an alley. A key character [for our purposes, Kreon] walks down the human alley while students/associated characters voice possible advice and thoughts to him/her” (Farmer, as cited in Medina et al., 2021, p. 139). I can envision students engaging in this activity with Kreon as the main character walking among the citizens of Thebes as hurl arguments to persuade him to change his mind about Antigone’s guilt

Also, students will engage in “Writing in role,” which invites “participants [to] write a piece of text as explicit or implied characters in the story (a journal, a letter, a newspaper, a flyer, etc.)” (Farmer, as cited in Medina et al., 2021, p. 139). Students may assume the persona of any character in Antigone and compose a letter to that character from themselves or from another character in the play. This is incorporated in the fourth quadrant below. In lieu of comprehension questions and quizzes, students will create a two-page spread in their notebook as a reader response assignment. I chose to have students do this three times (I chunk the play into three parts since Braun’s translation does not have traditional acts and scenes) to demonstrate their understanding.        

Four Quadrants Antigone

Students engage in a jigsaw on Greek theater and the tragic hero. They read Aristotelian Definition of Tragedy and Aristotle’s Tragic Hero. They analyze Kreon’s character and students formulate claims around if Kreon is a tragic hero.

Another lesson will be to compare excerpts from different translations (we read Braun’s) in order to consider how diction affects and changes meaning. Reading texts in translation, especially one as timeless as Antigone, highlights the collective struggles of Sophocles’ tragic characters, and like much literature, reflects what it means to be human.

Benchmark writing project:

Students will write collaboratively to compose a verse play inspired by Antigona González or a drama set in the present-day rather than in ancient times. Students may consider setting their plays outside of the U.S. to think about how the texts we read center young women who defy the unjust laws of her society and span both time and place. I will encourage multilingual students to incorporate their home languages into their original plays. Their plays may be sequels, visit characters in the afterlife, depict stories of civil disobedience, or may be thematically related in terms of student-selected social justice issues. They may be tragicomedies. The possibilities abound.

Students will collaborate in groups of four or five to compose their one act plays. They will decide on a plot structure: Freytag’s pyramid, the Fichtean Curve, The Hero’s Journey, or in media res. They will make decisions about how to incorporate the six elements of drama from Aristotle’s Poetics into their original plays: plot, character, theme, music, diction, and spectacle. Writing dialogues and monologues give attention to mood and tone, literary elements that are difficult to teach but come naturally when students are using their authentic voices to write.

Student ‘companies’ will perform the play in class for the audience of their peers or they have the option of recording it in advance and then showing the video in class. They will give and receive feedback to their peers using the PVLEGS rubric (Palmer, 2011). Overall, students will have applied four of our five core values throughout this writing project: inquiry, collaboration, presentation, and reflection. Also, they may have engaged in research, another core value, during their playwriting.

Our 9th grade students recently finished their one act plays, and reflected on the process of writing and performing them. In response to my question: What did you learn from collaborating to write your one act play? I will offer three of their reflections: “Your creativity expands a lot when you’re writing something like the play;” “I learned that anyone can be a writer and an actor;” and “Greek theater doesn’t have to be boring.” I appreciate that even if some did not enjoy reading Antigone, they still admit to learning through collaboration with their peers. Some themes I noticed were that students spoke of the difficulty of the group writing process and the values of teamwork and creativity.

Both of my 11th grade teaching assistants reflected on the 9th graders’ playwriting. One TA offers: “Students were brave enough to get in front of their classmates and peers and be creative. It was so entertaining to watch how much effort and skill they put into their presentations. As I watched it I noticed that a lot of people were engaged and it was almost like I was in a real theater sort of.” The second TA reflects: “Their plays were so full of emotion and conflict resolution that I had to pause and really appreciate their effort in following the script, using information about Greek theater and more. along with that people got the opportunity to perform live and they gave lots of emotion and made sure the audience felt it. It was awesome and I can’t wait to read more of their work!”

Lesson: CREATING a PASTICHE or HOMAGE (video)–students will create videos inspired by lines from Sophocles’ Antigone and Uribe’s Antígona González

Beers, K. & Probst, R. (2017). Disrupting thinking: Why how we read matters. Scholastic.

• I adapted the reader response questions from this book for poetry analysis: poem, head, and heart.

Carr, G. (2019, September 13). Fate and the state: Sophie Deraspe’s ‘Antigone.’ Another gaze: a feminist film journal. https://www.anothergaze.com/fate-state-sophie-deraspes-antigone-tiff/

• This film tells the story of Algerian migrants in Montreal. I may have students view a clip of this adaptation as a contemporary connection to Sophocles’ Antigone.

Fairhaven College, WWU. (2019, Feb. 5). Sara Uribe: “Antígona González: Thinking Through Language, the Body, Writing, and Translation in the Present.” [Video]. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/315483962

• This talk by Sara Uribe is the sole video I have found of the author online. Listening to her speak alongside the translator of Antígona González, John Pluecker, offers insight into her authorial intent.

Graff, G & Birkenstein, C. (2014). They say I say: The moves that matter in academic writing. W.W. Norton and Company.

• I offer this template to students to guide them in their written response to informational text. The goal is for writers to internalize the moves that writers make, the skill of identifying an author’s claim, and their own views on a topic.

Griffin, M. & Schenck, K. (2022, October 17). The wisdom of the ancients: a cathartic approach to teaching Antigone. Her voice at the table: teaching, writing, and well-being. https://www.hervoiceatthetable.com/post/the-wisdom-of-the-ancients-a-cathartic-approach-to-teaching-antigone

• This blog by teachers who have taught Antigone, offers reflection and supplementary texts such as Doerries’ The Theater of War, “The Island” set in South Africa, Antigone in Ferguson after the murder of Michael Brown, and Shamsie’s Home Fire.

Jenkins, R. (2003, March 30). ‘Antigone’ as a protest tactic. The New York Times. THEATER; ‘Antigone’ as a Protest Tactic – The New York Times

• In this 1973 adaptation, the characters in “The Island” rebel against the apartheid by performing Antigone for their guards and fellow inmates on Robben Island. This article offers a history of the playwrights, actors, and its subsequent stagings on Broadway, in London, and in Washington, D.C.

Lang, K. (2015, July 5). The tragedy giving hope to Syria’s women. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33362642

• This article reports on the Syrian woman who staged Antigone of Shatila in a Lebanese refugee camp.

Medina, C.L., Perry, M., Lee, B.K. & Deliman, A. (2021). Reading with drama: relations between texts, readers and experiences. Literacy, 55(2), 136-144.

• This article offers a sampling of drama activities to use with students. I have selected “Conscience Alley” and “Writing in Role” to implement during this unit.

Morales, H. (2020). Antigone Rising: The subversive power of the ancient myths. Bold Type Books.

• In her Coda, “Antigone Rising,” Morales writes about Uribe’s Antígona González, and the resonance of the myth about the misuses of power and injustices and contemporary women who uphold the spirit of Antigone. 

Muhammad, Gholdy. (2020). Cultivating genius: An equity framework for culturally and historically responsive literacy. Scholastic.

• Muhammad’s text offers a paradigm shift through her five pursuits: identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and joy. I make her scholarship visible to my students by using her pursuits as a guide to annotating a text.

Palmer, E. (2011). Well spoken: Teaching speaking to all students. Routledge.

• I use Palmer’s acronym, PVLEGS: poise, voice, life, eye contact, gestures, speed and delivery to teach effective speaking techniques to my students. We practice throughout the year and they utilize these elements in their drama performance. Students assess one another using a rubric and their reasoning, which they share in written and verbal form with their peers.

Rothstein, D. & Santana, L. (2011). Make just one change: Teach students to ask their own questions. Harvard Education Press.

• I have students engage in the QFT in preparation for each unit of study at least once a quarter. I select a thematically relevant image(s) to elicit their predictions about how it relates to the text we will read. An inquiry stance is the foundation of this technique in which students collaborate in generating and sharing open-ended (inferential) and closed (factual) questions.

Schoorl, L. (2017). Will You Join Me in Taking Up the Body?: On Sara Uribe’s “Antígona González.” Los Angeles Review of Books. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/will-join-taking-body-sara-uribes-antigona-gonzalez/

• In this article, Schoorl explains that that first person account in Antígona González is not a singular ‘I’ rather, an amalgamation of voices from texts such as articles, scripts, blogs, and theories. The author notes that the story is well-known in Latin America less so in the U.S. Uribe’s text weaves non-fiction into fiction.

Sophocles (1973). Antigone (Braun, R. Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published ca. 441 BCE).

• Braun’s translation of Antigone is the anchor text that students will read for this unit.

Uribe, S. (2016). Antígona González (Pluecker, J. Trans.). Les Figues Press.

• Uribe’s retelling of Antigone in the form of a verse novel offers a multitude of voices with side-by-side Spanish and English translations. Antígona is searching for the body of her dead brother, Tadeo González, so that she may give him a proper burial. This text is referred to as a landmark of contemporary Mexican literature.

Vecchione, P. & Raymond, A. (Eds.). (2019). Ink knows no borders: Poems of the immigrant and refugee experience. Seven Stories Press.

• This anthology of poetry offers a rich sampling from immigrant and refugee poets of many cultures. I have selected poems by Zamora, Elhillo, Limon, Acevedo, and Rios for students to read and analyze.

Vecchione, P. (2020). My shouting, shattered, whispering voice: A Guide to writing poetry and speaking your truth. Seven Stories Press.

• I will use Chapter 54, “A Formal Form for Fun (and Hopefully Not Too Much Frustration): The Ghazal” as a guide to teaching the form. Vecchione cites two poems: Agha Shahid Ali’s “Ghazal” and Perdomo’s “That’s My Heart Right There,” which I will use as exemplars.

Common Core Reading Standards addressed in this unit of study:

Common Core Writing Standards addressed in this unit of study:

Common Core Speaking & Listening Standards addressed in this unit of study: