Embedded Files
geographic tour assignment:
The Voice of the 'Other'
Jeans World Map courtesy of vladstudio.com and used with permission.
Rationale
Geographic Tour Assignment: The Voice of the ‘Other’ is a unit designed to meet Colorado Academic Standards for twelfth grade. The assignment directly addresses Standard 2: Reading for All Purposes and Standard 3: Writing and Composition. The Reading for All Purposes Standard expects secondary students to master conceptual skills of analysis, interpretation and evaluation of complex literary texts and to understand rhetorical and critical reading (CAS 56 – 57). For the Writing and Composition Standard, students are to master using ideas, evidence, structure and style to create persuasive, academic, and technical texts for particular audiences and for specific purposes (94 – 95). Students will be given multimodal genre options in the course and be able to choose between traditional alphabetic-only forms of expression as well as other forms of expression, such as podcasting, visual portraits, performance art, theatrics, and/or zines.
Students will be divided into six groups and each group assigned a chapter a week for six weeks (either consecutively or spread out over a nine month school year). The selected texts have been chosen for students to read in part or in whole alongside any required texts within a given English curriculum. A text representative of a different continent aims to provide the voice of the ‘other’ and directly address one of the inquiry questions within the Reading for All Purposes Standard: “What specific techniques in a classic text elicit historic attention or appreciation? Why?” Many historical epochs have not given the voice of the colonized ‘other’ “historic attention and appreciation” within an educational system. Therefore, Geographic Tour Assignment: The Voice of the ‘Other’ aims to teach from a perspective that pushes beyond Western-only perspectives and ideologies.
Overview
The unit will span over the course of six weeks and would be ideal for a twelfth grade 75-minute block period schedule. The unit may be more suitable to spread out across an entire school year, breaking up the six weeks to fit in with the overall curriculum. Students will be divided into six groups and assigned a different text each week for six weeks. The students will be asked to read the text on their own, annotating and formulating discussion questions. Students will then be asked to read the text a second time in smaller groups during the first couple of class periods after the text is assigned. How the voices of the author, the colonizer, and the colonized are represented within the historical and literary texts will be a guiding question for all the groups as well other questions generated by the students. A map of the world will be displayed in the classroom and used as a visual reference while traveling on the geographic tour.
Students will be taken on a geographic tour around the world and through different time periods, with an emphasis of reading along with the voice of ‘other.’ They will begin where they are, in North America, and read a chapter from the contemporary work Pushing the Bear: After the Trail of Tears by Diane Glancy. They will then “travel” back in time and to South America to read a poem by Pablo Neruda. Students will cross the sea and read an activist poem, “Aboriginal Charter of Rights,” by the Australian writer Oodgeroo Noonuccal. Their travel through literature will then take them to nineteenth century India where they will read Pandita Ramabai’s “The Cry of Indian Women.” The unit will next take them from India to Africa where students will examine Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions. Finally, students will read portions or the entire text of Andrea Levy’s Small Island where England and the colonies from India to Jamaica are represented (if reading entire novels, assignment completion may take longer than a week).
Each week the six groups will have to write, compose, and produce an artifact and share their different interpretations of the same text with the class and the other groups. The writing and composition will be held to the expectations of the CAS for Writing and Composition. Multimodal genres will be highly encouraged, if not required. Students will collect process work in individual portfolios throughout the journey through each text and will all be assessed individually. Collectively students will be evaluated as a group after finishing each reading from each location. At the end of the unit, students will have six artifacts potentially composed in a variety of genres.
Purpose
The purpose of the Geographic Tour Assignment: The Voice of the ‘Other’ is for students to gain exposure to a variety of texts voiced from a colonized ‘other’ living in different cultures and time periods. The texts all connect with imperialism and students will have the opportunity to read a voice that for many years was silenced by colonial rule. Postcolonial studies emphasize how the ‘other’ or the colonized, in an imperial context, represent themselves and are represented in empire texts. The aim of the unit is to allow students to begin thinking about writers and ideas from different cultures. Throughout this process students will perform rhetorical analyses and compose expressions of these complex texts in a variety of modalities.
Genre options
The group presentations are to be approved by the instructor and students are encouraged to think creatively and outside of the box. Traditional alphabetic pieces of prose and poetry are acceptable, but given the technology anything from podcasts to short video clips to interpretive dance can be presented by the groups. Groups should feel free to explore their creativity and express these texts in meaningful and inventive ways.
Audience
The audience for the group presentations will primarily be the classroom writing community, i.e. the instructor and student peers. However, if podcasts or videos are created, publishing to YouTube or Vimeo may be an option worth serious discussion and consideration. Twenty-first century composers have been given the opportunity to communicate with a worldwide audience via the Internet, which is a right not to take lightly.
Readings by continent and work*
North America
Pushing the Bear: After the Trail of Tears, Diane Glancy (2009)
South America
Canto General, "La United Fruit Co." Pablo Neruda (1950)
Australia
“Aboriginal Charter of Rights,” Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1962)
India
“The Cry of Indian Women,” Pandita Ramabai (1883)
Africa
Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga (1988)
Europe
Small Island, Andrea Levy (2004)
*Other works, of course, can be selected to fit the schema of the colonized 'other' and used within the framework of the assignment. Authors ought to literally and appropriately give voice to a colonized person. However, voices of the colonizer may also be selected to stimulate conversation about the ways the colonized voice and perspective differs from the voice of the colonized 'other.'
Requirements
Students will be required to individually read the assigned texts generating annotations and discussion questions
Students will close read the text in small discussion groups and discuss for understanding of plot and thematic elements
Students will keep an individual portfolio of their annotated copy of the text, their discussion questions, any process writing that occurs, and a reflection of their individual and collective experience
Students will participate in a group presentation, in a modality of the group’s choosing, and present their work to the instructor and the class
Individual Portfolio & Group Presentation
An individual portfolio of student work will be submitted for assessment
Participation and a checklist of criteria will guide the assessment of the group presentation
North America
Pushing the Bear: After the Trail of Tears, Diane Glancy (2009)
Biographical note
"Diane Glancy was born in 1941, in Kansas City, Missouri. She obtained a M.A. degree from Central State University in 1983 and an M.F.A from the University of Iowa in 1988. She is known for works in which she uses realistic language and vivid imagery to address such subjects as spirituality, family ties and her identity as a person of mixed blood. She is a poet, short story writer, playwright, essayist, and educator. She is assistant professor of English at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota" (http://www.ipl.org/div/natam/bin/browse.pl/A35).
Notes on Glancy
"Pushing the Bear: After the Trail of Tears tells the story of Cherokees’ resettlement in the hard years following Removal. In this sequal to her popular 1996 novel Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears, author Dian Glancy continues the tale of one Cherokee family” (Back Cover).
Religion; Christianity; Conversion; Assimilation; Oral Tradition; Language; Politics (i.e. Land acquisition, treaties, etc.)
Thematic Discussion of a Passage from Pushing the Bear... by Diane Glancy
“Remember walking. Remember the clouds walking with us. Remember the wind that walked with us. The cold. Remember the longing to stop marching. We have done that now. Remember the people we left in graves. Remember the voices that came from the sky. There is change. Change. Remember we knew that change was here. Remember the birds. Their voices came with us. Not the same birds, no, but the song of their voices. Remember the sound of wagons. The snort of horses. The protest of the land - not to us, no, but to the ones who made us walk. Remember the moon. Remember the corn. We will taste it again. Remember the need to listen, to hear, to live. Remember the sun that will cross the sky, that will plow the day again. Remember all things that will work again. The stars that will turn again. The cabins that will stand again. Remember the hills in the old territory that disappeared in the distance. Are they still there, far away?” (5).
“What a rough road forgiveness was. What a muddy field. You couldn’t walk away from it clean. Forgiveness stuck to you. Or the process of forgiveness. It plowed a field. It made way for a crop” (171).
Glancy’s historical fiction tells a story of resettlement that occurred “from October 1838 through February 1839” and remembers how “eleven to thirteen thousand Cherokees walked nine hundred miles in bitter cold from the Southeast to Indian Territory. One-fourth died or disappeared along the way” (3). Glancy traces the lives of one family and the hardships they experienced trying to survive.
A religious tension between Christians and conjurers persists throughout the novel. Reverend Jesse Bushyhead was “a Cherokee minister who led one of the detachments” (ix) and established a Christian church in the new territory. Some Cherokees were converted to Christianity and were baptized, such as the central characters Maritole and Knobowtee and their children. However, the converted Christians still called on conjurers to help them when desperately digging a well at the end of the story. Glancy’s deeply spiritual story enacts the reality of how Cherokees were forced into a new way of life and how everything changed, including their religion.
South America
Canto General, "La United Fruit Co." Pablo Neruda (1950)
“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.”
~Pablo Neruda~
Cuando sonó la trompeta, estuvo
todo preparado en la tierra,
y Jehova repartió el mundo
a Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, y otras entidades:
la Compañía Frutera Inc.
se reservó lo más jugoso,
la costa central de mi tierra,
la dulce cintura de América.
Pablo Neruda, from "La United Fruit Co.," Canto General
Biographical note
"Pablo Neruda (July 12, 1904 – September 23, 1973) was the pen name and, later, legal name of the Chilean Communist writer and politician Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto. He chose his pen name in honour of the famous Czech poet Jan Neruda…Neruda was accomplished in a variety of styles ranging from erotically charged love poems like his collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, surrealist poems, historical epics, and overtly political manifestos. In 1971 Neruda won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the twentieth century in any language." Neruda always wrote in green ink as it was the color of "esperanza" or hope" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Neruda).
Notes on Neruda
His poems resist the imperialistic mistreatment of Latin America
His Communist affiliation and exile from Chile in 1948 provides an opportunity for socio-political readings of his poems
Thematic Discussion of Neruda and “La United Fruit Co.
It rebaptized these countries
Banana Republics,
and over the sleeping dead,
over the unquiet heroes
who won greatness,
liberty, and banners,
it established an opera buffa:
it abolished free will,
gave out imperial crowns,
encouraged envy, attracted
the dictatorship of flies:
Trujillo flies, Tachos flies
Carias flies, Martinez flies,
Ubico flies, flies sticky with
submissive blood and marmalade,
drunken flies that buzz over
the tombs of the people,
circus flies, wise flies
expert at tyranny.
Pablo Neruda, from "La United Fruit Co.," Canto General
The bricolage of the first stanza of Neruda's poem (i.e. calling the corporations of "Coca-Cola" and "Ford Motors" out by name) sets up a thematic atmosphere of oppression. Neruda's goes further to say, "The United Fruit Company reserved for itself the most juicy piece, the central coast of my world, the delicate waist of America." Here Neruda personalizes the actions of the corporation and establishes himself not only as poet, but also as victim. A discussion of oppression and what Neruda means by "the sleeping dead," "unquiet heroes," and "the dictatorship of flies" might also be further discussed in thinking about the second and third stanza. Finally, due to Neruda's Communist political affiliation, reading the poem within a critical framework of Karl Marx's historical materialism may be fruitful to consider.
Australia
“Aboriginal Charter of Rights,” Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1962)
“Make us equals, not dependents”
~Oodgeroo Noonuccal~
Biographical note
"Stradbroke Island is one of the beautiful islands that form part of the Great Sandy Region of southeast Queensland. The Noonuccal people inhabited this island for countless generations. They called it Minjerribah. On 3 November 1920, the newest Noonuccal descendant had just been born...I arrived about a week before expected, at the home of white friends where there was a wedding in progress; and the little black baby stole the show from the star performer, the bride. They named me Kathleen Jean Mary Ruska” (Cochrane 3).
Notes on Noonuccal
Oodgeroo was a poet who claimed her voice and fought against Australian subjection. Many of her poems could be used in a secondary classroom to explore themes of how a colonized or subjected individual “writes back” and resists the oppression of colonial powers.“ Aboriginal Charter of Rights” was written as a contribution to the proceedings of the fifth annual general meeting of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Adelaide” (165).
Themes in “Aboriginal Charter of Rights” by Oodgeroo Noonuccal
We want hope, not racialism
Brotherhood, not ostracism
Black advance, not white ascendance:
Make us equals, not dependents…
You dishearten, not defend us.
Circumscribe, who should befriend us.
Give us welcome, not aversion,
Give us choice, not cold coercion,
Status, not discrimination,
Human rights, not segregation…
Though baptized and blessed and Bibled
We are still tabooed and libeled
You devout Salvation-sellers,
Make us neighbours, not fringe-dwellers…
Must we native Old Australians
In our own land rank as aliens? (166)
Oodgeroo Noonuccal, "Aboriginal Charter of Rights"
Many themes from racialism to alienation could be interrogated and expanded. Oodgeroo gives voice to the colonized, silenced by the British colonizer. She posits what the aborigines deserve: “welcome,” “choice,” “status” followed by what the aborigines received. She references the religious indoctrination and how even after being Christianized the aborigines of Australia were still “tabooed and libeled.” Students will be able to take Oodgeroo’s poem in numerous directions, perhaps even in digital, visual interpretations.
India
“The Cry of Indian Women,” Pandita Ramabai (1883)
Biographical note
“In the mystic’s spirit of seeing the world in a grain of sand, one may find Pandita Ramabai’s whole life (1858 – 1922) encapsulated in a photograph of her during her last year’s, head bowed over her Marathi translation of the Bible” (Kosambi 1).
Certainly there was much more to Pandita Ramabai than the image described in this photograph and even her remarkable accomplishment of translating the entire Bible into Marathi. She was a religious figure who spoke against the oppression of woman in late-nineteenth century India, writing many pleading letters. Her books include The High-Caste Hindu Woman and Our Inexhaustible Treasure.
Notes on Pandita Ramabai
“She presented a graphic picture of oppressed Indian womanhood to Western readers with a trained ethnographer’s eye, but without sacrificing her nationalist pride and right to interrogate colonial rule: and she brought news of exciting social and political reforms in the far-off United States of America to her Marathi readers with empathetic understanding of the prevailing local conditions. The ease with which she straddled the East and West was unique in the heyday of Empire and Orientalism” (3).
Converted to Christianity, married an Indian Christian, part of early 19th century feminist movement; sole survivor of famine that wiped out her entire family (Brinks 17 Feb. 2010).
Thematic Discussion of a Passage from “The Cry of Indian Woman” by Pandita Ramabai
“…people rid themselves of their daughters by marrying them [off] at an early age, following the general practice. When a girl has attained the age of ten or eleven, she has to live with her husband’s family. For the time they live with their parents they pass a tolerably happy life. But when these girls are married there is a life of misery in store for them in the future. Those that lead happy lives after marriage are very rare, and are considered to be very fortunate. Young children, not even able to speak well, are snatched away from the lap of their mothers and thrown into the crush of worldly life” (107).
The treatment of children and women during this time must be analyzed with careful emphasis not to stereotype all of Indian men as oppressive. Research on the caste system in India might help with fully understanding the context of Ramabai’s world. Ramabai discusses her involvement with the Arya Mahila Samaj Association and states that “the objects of the Association are three – 1st, to put a stop to the marriage of children; 2nd, to prevent a man re-marrying while the first wife is living; 3rd, to give help to destitute women; and to encourage female education” (112). Conversations could be held about the oppressive structure of the patriarchal system in India. However, this becomes complicated when considering the way the British government in India used various "reforms as a wedge issue and promoted themselves as liberators of India's oppressed women" (Brinks). Ramabai begs for Government involvement and “the consent of the entire community” (112). Another cultural practice perhaps worth discussing might be the sati practice, where widows of deceased husbands were burned on the funeral pyre. Ramabai staunchly opposed this practice and it would be worth connecting her ideas of woman oppression to cultural practices in the West.
Africa
Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga (1988)
“The condition of native is a nervous condition.”
~Frantz Fanon~
Biographical Note
Tsitsi Dangarembga is a “Zimbabwean writer, whose novel Nervous Conditions (1988) has become a modern African classic. It was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1989. Tsitsi Dangarembga has dealt in her works with the oppressive nature of a patriarchal family structure and a woman's coming-of-age."
"My soul is African," Dangarembga said, "it is from there that springs the fountain of my creative being" (http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/tsitsi.htm).
Notes on Dangarembga
Jean-Paul Sarte says, “At first it is not their [the natives] violence, it is ours [the colonizing powers] which...rends them; and the first action of these oppressed creatures is to bury deep down that hidden anger...If the suppressed fury [of the colonized subject] fails to find an outlet, it turns into a vacuum and devastates the oppressed creatures themselves (Brinks 26 March 2010).
Linguistic Acquisition; Code switching; Illness; Outlet v. Disconnection
Thematic Discussion of a Passage from Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
"It’s not England any more and I ought to adjust. But when you’ve seen different things you want to be sure you’re adjusting to the right thing. You can’t go on all the time being whatever’s necessary. You’ve got to have some conviction, and I’m convinced I don’t want to be anyone’s underdog. It’s not right for anyone to be that. But once you get used to it, well, it just seems natural and you just carry on. And that’s the end of you. You’re trapped. They control everything you do" (Dangarembga 119).
The above passage is taken from a conversation between Tambu and Nyasha. Nyasha proves to be a character of resistance who resists the patriarchal ideologies of her father Babamukuru, an English educated, financially successful Zimbabwean. By means of starving herself and acting out to the point of hysteria, Nyasha shows how the power structures of colonization can lead the colonized to the point of illness. In turn, her resistance exposes the illness of the patriarchy and power structure itself. Standing up to her father, Babamukuru, demonstrates the lack of control he has over members of his own household despite whatever successes he has experienced in the world.
Analyzing the four central female characters in Nervous Conditions provides a point of entry into considering the larger social and cultural themes present in the book. Nyasha, for instance, raises many avenues for discussion. Her character forces the voice of the ‘other’ to be heard in the generational conflicts she experiences with her father and mother, in the control and politicization she performs with her body, the suffering she experiences as a result, and the alienation she experiences from going to England and returning (Brinks).
At the end of the book, Nyasha has been pushed to the point of hysteria. She continues to starve herself and replaces the consumption of food with the consumption of history in books. The climax at the end, where Nyasha acts out, shows that her sickness is symptomatic of the oppression caused by colonialism.
Europe
Small Island, Andrea Levy (2004)
“In the widely cited words of the feminist poet and social critic Adrienne Rich, we need “to understand how a place on the map is also a place in history” (Friedman 263).
Biographical note
"Born in 1956 to Jamaican parents, Andrea Levy is the author of three previous novels and has received a British Arts Council Writers Award in addition to many other distinctions. She lives and works in London" (Levy 443).
Notes on Levy
Questions, issues, and instances of migration can be used as a thematic guide to perform an analysis of Small Island. Susan Stanford Friedman’s “Migrations, Diasporas, and Borders” might serve as a critical text to guide students. Other themes involving migration might be:
• Assimilation
• Culture Clash; Colonial Alientaion
• Intermarriage
• Hybridity
Thematic Discussion of a Passage from Small Island by Andrea Levy
"The angry bees, amassing to a black smoke, trailed the bucking mule before entirely enveloping it. I was standing still because if you stand still you cannot be stung. ‘Gilbert, you wan’ see us eaten alive, man?’ Elwood shook my shoulder as he struggled to pull on his veil and tuck up his clothes with gloved hands. A doodlebug - that’s where I had heard the sound: the bees droned resonant as those flying bombs" (Levy 169).
The metaphor and image of bees remains highly suggestive in any discussion of mid-twentieth century colonial studies and is but one that can be chosen from Andrea Levy’s Small Island. Thinking of Britain as “Mother” or “Queen Bee,” and the British colonies that filled nearly a third of the globe as locations to exploit, can be used as an entry into thinking about empire. This image of bees and mules may allow for further reflection on the family and matriarchal relationships, between the peoples of “Queen Bee” England and the colonized peoples of Jamaica and India, in Small Island.
In the above passage, Britain might be read as representative of “the angry bees” and Jamaica (or other colonies) as “the bucking mule” (169). The somewhat poetic reading suggests that if the colonized ‘other,’ such as Jamaicans or Indians in Small Island, complies with the will of the colonizing Britain, then they will be treated the way Queenie treats the community of Jamaicans throughout the novel. Queenie “protects” and takes Jamaicans “under her wing” (or at least so she thinks) and acts as a matriarch figure. However, one might be suspicious of the matriarchal “bee” family attacking when “the mule” begins to buck or resist the wishes of the status quo or “the angry bee” (Bernard) decides he doesn’t want Jamaicans living in his house.
Gilbert’s comparison to the sound of the bees to flying bombs connects to the war Britain was currently engaged in with India, during the year the novel is set, in 1948. A historic connection to bees can be related to New Zealand, another of Britain’s colonies, in a news article appearing five years after the time of the novel’s setting. A June 1, 1953 news piece in The News Chronicle, titled “The New Elizabethan,” discusses “a bee farmer from New Zealand.” The bee farmer is praised and named a hero for his “conquest” of Mt. Everest. The article states, “there are no heights or difficulties which the British people cannot overcome” (The News Chronicle).
glogster:
Glogster is a Web 2.0 tool for designing online posters. It is an excellent way for students to introduce themselves in a twenty-first century classroom and perform twenty-first century composition. The above Glogster poster was designed to give students and readers of this dictionary insight into the person I am professionally, personally, and poetically (Click here or on the poster above to view a teacher sample created on Glogster).
graphic narratives:
Professor of English at Colorado State University Dr. Louann Reid once distinguished graphic narratives from graphic novels by explaining that an author need not write a novel to communicate graphically. Reid used a book created by William Ayers and Ryan Alexander-Tanner titled To Teach: The Journey, in Comics to teach various teaching methods in language arts. Ayers’ narrative can serve as an effective pedagogical tool for imagining alternative ways to approach teaching. Messages communicated with the medium of graphics can be communicated in almost any genre of writing. For instance, students might be given the choice to either respond to a reading assignment with a traditional alphabetic mode of summarizing or be shown how to create a 6-panel summary response. The below teacher sample was created in response to chapters from Jim Burke’s What’s the Big Idea and Peter Smagorinsky’s Teaching English by Design: How to Create and Carry Out Instructional Units (Click on image to see a larger version).
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