Exploring Identity

This year, the 4th grade teaching team harnessed the power of stories to candidly explore issues of culture and identity that students wanted to know more about. Tapping into the students’ life experiences and growing literacy skills, the new unit, which featured six books published in the last two years, inspired conversations far deeper and more wide-ranging than anyone expected.

 

The content of the performance was challenging for the students. It awakened their interest and it raised many questions for them—What does equal pay mean? Why would women be paid less than men? and What’s the “T” in LGBT? Teachers recognized the importance of these questions and the children’s desire to know more, so they took time to break the oration down into manageable chunks and explore the content and student questions in more depth. As a result of preparing for the performance, 4th graders learned a great deal about important issues of identity in historical context.

But, as Associate Teacher J Bernick and 4th Grade Teacher Karen Balian explained, the 4th grade team also wanted students to have the chance to explore their own identities: they wanted students to consider the different identity groups to which they belong and understand how identity shapes human interactions and relationships. The teachers understood that these kinds of explorations can help children develop confidence, emotional sturdiness, and a sense of belonging. And, when children have this foundation, they are better able to face challenges, persist, and take risks—all of which are central to the process of learning both in an out of the classroom.

Teachers were aware of a growing number of books addressing identity development written for students in this age range. It was too good an opportunity to pass up, and the idea for the 4th grade “Identity Book Groups” was born. It was an ambitious idea to execute in the middle of the year, but teachers felt so strongly about the potential of the book groups to deepen their students’ learning in important ways that they were willing to shift lessons and schedules to make time.

The 4th grade team identified an appropriate range of books, each of which represented at least one of the “big eight” social identifiers—ability, age, cultural heritage, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class. Students were given the opportunity to choose the books they were most interested in discussing, and additional teachers were recruited to facilitate the eight groups that were planned. Schedules were created, checked, and rechecked to ensure that students from different classrooms who were in the same book group could meet twice a week at the same time and that teachers who were not part of the 4th grade team could lead their assigned groups. Logistics were the most difficult part of planning the unit.

The teachers quickly discovered that their hard work had paid off. Director of Diversity Michelle Belton and Director of Primary School Jason Novak found that students in their groups were reading ahead—they just couldn’t help themselves. J heard one student say, “I don’t even like reading books, and I love this!”

Let that sink in for a minute: “I don’t even like reading books, and I love this!”

The first framework, designed to help students reflect on their reading process, asked them to articulate their impressions, share their wonderings, and make connections. According to Michelle, students were familiar with this framework and had “already mastered the format of a reading group.” They made inferences, recognized the structure of the narrative and used it to help them access the story’s ideas, and asked good questions that lead to relevant explorations beyond the text.

The second framework asked students to characterize their relation to the story in terms of windows and mirrors. Students were asked to share ways that the story acts like a mirror, in which they see their own identity and experiences reflected, and ways the story acts like a window, through which they are able to see the identity and experiences of others. This framework helped students explore their own and others’ experiences and perspectives, examine how they are similar or different, and question their own assumptions.

Throughout the unit, it became increasingly clear to teachers how much the stories and discussions meant to their students. Fourth graders were connecting deeply with the characters, even those who seemed different from themselves, on an emotional level. The students who read Out of My Mind by Sharon M. Draper “were nearly in tears over the injustices that the main character experienced,” recalled Karen. She knew that the students in her group were internalizing the main character’s journey from their comments in discussion: “Melody couldn’t come to Lowell School; she could never get up to all the classrooms in her wheelchair.” And, when Melody got a computer and could speak, students celebrated: “She finally got a voice!”

Sometimes, it was a challenge for students to understand a character’s experiences or perspective, and this drew them deep in to the story, too. J led the discussion group that read Alex Gino’s George. The main character keeps her feelings about herself a secret for a long time, which was hard for the children to understand. When the students read about what happened when she did share her secret, “they gained a greater appreciation of how hard it was to be herself,” and later, they learned “how instrumental her friends were in helping her,” said J.

Students reading In the Footsteps of Crazy Horse with Michelle had many questions about the response of the Lakota people when travelers on the Oregon Trail broke the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851. Ultimately, Crazy Horse led warriors into battle as a result of the settlers' encroachments on Lakota territory and way of life. But initially, the Lakota people did not retaliate, and the students wanted to know why. They also wanted to know why the settlers broke the treaty in the first place. Answering these questions required close reading and inferential thinking and also encouraged outside reading and fact-finding.

The students in Brian Stark’s group, which read Ungifted by Gordon Korman, were immediately drawn into the central intellectual questions posed by the story:

The focus of novel centered around what it means to be gifted and [if] that label accurately captures who a person is. I wasn’t sure that our students would quite get what is meant by gifted, as Lowell is not a school that would use that label. However, they unanimously expressed displeasure with the term and could speak of the many ways that someone is gifted that would not be recognized by this label.

According to Brian, the “most involved and energetic conversations were around different perspectives on a single event. The group really dug into why the characters would have completely different takes on what happened.” As students tried to determine characters’ motivations and uncover what really happened, Brian had them support their suppositions with evidence from the text. But, the story was more than a mystery to be figured out. The different perspectives also challenged the students “to hold and reconcile various points of view.”

As the book group experience came to a close, Brian was struck by the depth and fullness of his students’ experience of the book:

The kids kept returning to the idea that gifts could take many forms and kept coming up with examples from their own lives about family and friends to illustrate their point. It grew more and more clear through the reading that this unit inspired them to connect a narrative to their own experience and evaluate the veracity, humanity, and righteousness of the character’s actions compared to how they view the world. 

No doubt, each student would have their own story to tell about participating in the book groups—the ideas that challenged them to think in new ways, the compelling characters they met along the way, the connections they made with each other, and the discoveries they made about themselves.

The experience left everyone wanting more. The unit that began as a creative departure from the already-planned curriculum so that teachers could address students’ in-the-moment needs and interests will likely be reprised in next year’s 4th grade curriculum. And why not, when so many students rose to the occasion and showed the depth and breadth their thinking can encompass when both their hearts and minds are engaged.