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Section 1: Overview

What is Community?

We will consider communities as physical spaces, how communities function, and how communities influence the lives of its members. Before exploring the communities of others, we will first identify our own communities. We will then consider the following questions:

  • What are the defining characteristics of a community?

  • In what ways are individuals’ identities shaped by their communities?

  • How do authors convey the essential elements of their communities to outsiders through the manipulation of tone, text structure, and rhetorical appeals?

  • Which authorial tools can I use in my own expression of my community?

We will use close reading skills to examine how authors reveal the explicit and implicit rules of a variety of communities. We will also consider how these expectations influence, enable, or constrain the identity of members.

  • Lesson 1:

    We will analyze the Culminating Task and reflect on our own experiences to analyze the relationship between individuals and the communities to which they belong. We will deepen our understanding of community by examining the settings, themes, and other key details of a crowdsourced narrative poem that offers unique perspectives on people’s lives and their communities.

  • Lesson 2:

    We will read and deconstruct Fatimah Asghar’s poem, “If They Should Come for Us” and compare it to “Where I’m From.”

  • Lesson 3:

    We will analyze “If They Should Come for Us” by Fatimah Asghar to determine what the poem tells us about community.

  • Lesson 4:

    We will compare and contrast two narrative poems that offer differing pictures of belonging in a community. We will compare how the speakers in each poem learn both the spoken and unspoken rules of their communities.

  • Lesson 5:

    We will examine the author’s use of repetition in “If They Should Come for Us.” We will then describe the impact of this repetition on our understanding of the author’s perspective about community.

  • Lesson 6:

    We will compare and contrast two narrative poems that offer pictures of two different ways of belonging in a community. We will then compare how the speakers in each poem learn the spoken and unspoken rules of their community.

  • Lesson 7:

    As a class, we will participate in a Socratic Seminar to deepen our knowledge about communities, using evidence and examples from any of the texts we have read during the unit to respond to questions. Then, we will write short personal reflections about the seminar and our participation in the seminar.

  • Lesson 8:

    We will review the teacher’s feedback on our Section Diagnostic and will use the feedback to make revisions to our work.

  • Lesson 9:

    We will commence an Independent Reading Program in which we choose texts to read independently as we progress through the unit. We will learn how to choose texts, what activities we may complete, about the final task, and about any materials we will use as we read our independent reading texts. We will begin by reading our texts, using tools to help us take notes and analyze important textual elements.