Students should learn that urban art forms, like rap, have a history that connects them to the community’s past and to other literary forms. Specifically, rap descends from the Afro-American traditions of spirituals, shouts, the blues, and jazz. These traditions express the drama of slavery, liberation and migration from the South to northern and western cities. This week will introduce the unit’s literacy goals: to identify and use poetic form in drama, poetry, rap and the blues; to read and interpret fiction and non-fiction; to write creatively and analytically; to explore the influence of the past on the present. This introduction will be accomplished by exploring the similarities and linkages between the three forms in Afro-American writers and performers.
WEEKS 2 & 3 OBJECTIVES:
Students should learn to read and interpret drama in context. We will read The Piano Lesson by August Wilson. This 1990 Pulitzer Prize winning drama tells the story of a family torn between the ghosts of their past lives on a plantation in the Yazoo Delta of Mississippi and the promise of a new life in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Their story dramatizes the general theme of migration to the city and they personify those who carried the Blues from the South into the cities of the North and West. We will study dramatic form, focusing on narrative technique but examining other elements of drama such as setting, characterization and dialogue. The play is in two acts; we will read act I in week 2 and read act II in week 3. After completing the reading and discussion of each act, we will also watch a video version of the play. Students will keep a journal of their reflections on the play and use the journal(in combination with their research) to compose a essay for final evaluation. Journal will be evaluated at the end of the unit on a pass/ fail basis.Students will undertake individual projects in small group setting on one of four themes: 1] Cities: communities of migrants; 2] Migrants: carriers of tradition; 3] Drama: embodied storytelling; 4] Rap: stories of today’s City. Each group will seek to answer selected questions through independent research using material provided by the teacher, the library, their community, and the Internet. Primary questions for the groups will be: 1] How are cities (NY, SF, LA, Miami, or your city) shaped by immigration (internal and external) in terms of neighborhoods, economics and politics? 2] Who are/ were the primary immigrant groups to the selected cities and what emotional burdens and artistic gifts do/did they bring with them? 3] How does drama differ from oral histories, poetry, song? What other plays tell the stories of other migrant communities (for example Death of a Salesman tells the story of the middle-class white salesman escaping from the inner city to the nearby suburb only to be eventually overtaken by urban expansion, or Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie tells the story of a white family’s move from prosperity in Mississippi to poverty in St. Louis)? What are other plays by August Wilson that continue this story of Afro-Americans’ journey from the past to the future? 4] How is the city presented in rap? What are the dramatic elements used in rap? Students will present their research to the class in week 4, and in combination with their journal they will write an expository essay connecting their topic to The Piano Lesson.
WEEK 4 OBJECTIVES:
Students should integrate, consolidate and demonstrate what they have learned about urban art forms like rap, the blues, poetry and drama. They should demonstrate their knowledge of the history that connects these art forms to the community’s past and to other literary forms.
