Initiating Experiences

Strategies for Launching the Unit

Our goal for this inquiry unit is to empower students to enter the diverse and beautiful lives of others through literature. We believe that critical multicultural literature has the power to enable young readers to better understand the world around them and view difference empathetically. The books that our students encounter can, in the words of Rudine Sims Bishop, serve as windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors through which they can access valuable lessons about themselves and others.

Activity #1: A Mind-Stretching Exercise in Empathy

The teacher will explain that they are about to engage in an exercise that allows them to briefly adopt the perspective of another. The teacher should make a point to explain that it is impossible to fully understand the plight of refugees, and that it is problematic to believe such a fallacy. The purpose of this exercise is to get students in a serious and respectful headspace for learning about displaced and migrant characters in A Crack in the Sea.

Students should be sitting in groups of four to six. The teacher will begin the activity by announcing the following:

"You have been notified that you and your family must flee your home with only 30 minutes notice.

You meet together for a hurried discussion. What are you going to do? Your family is in particular danger.

It takes several hours to the nearest state border by car, but soldiers are patrolling the streets and road travel could be very dangerous. Travelling by foot would mean a whole week’s journey through difficult terrain. The airport is already swamped and there are stories of people getting arrested or beaten while trying to buy plane tickets."

Student groups will fill out the following worksheets in the time alotted.

When group work has ended, students will share their responses and discuss them as a class. Students are likely to say that some of the decisions that they were forced to make were extremely difficult or nearly impossible. Teachers should use this moment as an opportunity to remind their students that there are real people who must encounter these impossible situations as a reality. The class discussion that results from this activity can be very powerful and eye-opening.

Activity #2: Adopting Perspective and Building Bridges

The teacher will explain to the class that they are about to engage in a literary analysis of the poem "Refugee Blues" by W.H. Auden. The poem is written from the perspective of a fictitious, unnamed Jewish person living in Germany prior to World War II, and it describes some of the oppression and antagonism that characterized the time. The purpose of this activity is to activate students' prior knowledge on a human rights abuse that they will have already been introduced to in order to prepare them for the gravity of the plight of some of the character's in Bowman's A Crack in the Sea.

The activity will start with an oral reading of the poem. The teacher may choose to read it aloud, call on an eager student, or show the below video from the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

Students should be seated in 6 groups, if possible. Each group will be given two stanzas of the poem to read and become "experts" on. Each group will be tasked with putting their two stanzas into their own words and teaching the class about their part of the poem. At the end, the story in the poem will be retold and enriched by students' voices. The poem is below.