English Confronting Modernity: Becoming Citizens of the World: Discovering Dominga Joins the Conversation

Monday, September 24, 2012

Discovering Dominga Joins the Conversation

Over the weekend, students read chapters five and six of Tree Girl; these chapters are heart-wrenching, and students expressed as much today when I saw them. Because of the graphic nature of these chapters, I decided it was important for students to have the choice to start and stop reading as they needed and even to skip over a page or two if the content proved to be too overwhelming. Some students told me they were glad to be able to cry in privacy; others told me that they did actually have to stop reading at parts. Still, other students simply said, "This book is good, and I couldn't put it down."

In chapter six, Gabi's teacher, Manuel Quispe, is attacked. During the 1980s, the Guatemalan army was systematically killing Maya leaders who might organize government resistance. Mikaelsen, the author of Tree Girl rendered this in the novel; Manuel was with Gabi and other students when the soldiers, some Civil Patrolmen (Maya forced to work for the military), attacked them. Gabi survives by climbing a tree; she is Tree Girl after all, but she witnesses the massacre and narrates the events vividly. And then in chapter six, after hearing this violence has spread to other cantons, Gabi returns home from the market to find her own canton scorched. Students bear witness to the atrocity as listeners of Gabi's story, and they are filled with questions of "why." Doing inquiry, putting other texts in conversation, is one way students can have agency in their learning, but inquiry is also a life-long skill. Truth is complex and ever-shifting; as we add to a central narrative we find answers and make space for more questions. There comfort in doing something to find answers, but there is a discomfort in never quite knowing what is truth -- this is learning.

Today we viewed the documentary Discovering Dominga in order to 1) put a first-hand account in conversation with the first person narrator in Tree Girl and 2) see what additional questions emerge when new information is introduced. What happened to the Maya in Guatemala in the 1980s and why? What was going on across the country that, once again, exploited the Maya? And how, once again, have the Maya responded to signs of change?

Procedures:

To prepare for the documentary, Discovering Dominga, students read a short article about Rio Negro. In any lesson, the "how" of reading and writing is essential. For today, the "how" was to focus on topic-specific language to set a purpose for reading. The strategy is to highlight or underline topic-specific words in the questions before reading. This way, before reading, students are primed for the content and have a purpose for reading. After reading, I asked students to write their own questions about what they read and still want to know about Rio Negro.

Here are a couple of sources that you can use for the pre-viewing reading, but there are a lot of options on the Internet. This topic can and should be extended to include an activism piece. After doing more research for this lesson, I saw that Rio Negro, perhaps more than other massacre sites during this genocide, is an excellence example of cooperation and solidarity efforts as there are quite a view organizations working to attain justice for the victims:

Before viewing, we set up Research Log #3 for notes about who, what, where, when, and why. We also talked about how a documentary is a weaving of interviews and re-enactments with some archived footage.

During the viewing of Discovering Dominga, students took notes on their Research log. It is a story about Denese Becker, an "Americanized" refugee from Guatemala living in Iowa and raising two children. She tells her extraordinary story: at age ten she survived a massacre in her village of Rio Negro during the 1980s Guatemalan civil war, a conflict primarily between the government and the guerrillas. Denese, born Dominga, remembers and bears witness to the massacres that killed her mother and father with the help of other survivors, but she is left with more questions. She and her family do research into what exactly happened and who was responsible. Their research reveals that this chapter in Denese's life is actually a hidden chapter in U.S. history; in 1954, a CIA coup overthew the democratic government making Guatemala a military state and a partner in agriculture. The U.S. continued to support the military in the 1980s , in part, to protect the land for the United Fruit Company. In this documentary, we see Denese finding her voice and becoming a political activist as she brings awareness to the atrocities in Guatemala both in Guatemala and in her home town of Iowa. Here is a discussion guide for more information: http://www.pbs.org/pov/film-files/dd_discussion_guide_action_discussion_file_0.pdf.

Because Tree Girl is historical fiction, I thought it was important to show a first-hand account of Denese's voyage of discovery as she became familiar with the history of the U.S. intervention in Guatemala but also how she fought for justice by testifying in court and partiicipating in survivors groups. Despite the odds, the Maya of Guatemala have survived and maintained their heritage, religion, and languages. Today, Mayans constitute 60 to 80 % of Guatemala’s population.

Homework: read chapters 7-8 of Tree Girl and complete the study guide

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Re-imagining the English Classroom

This unit is an example of what English teachers can do to explore global issues of social justice through reading and writing. This is specifically designed using eighth grade Common Core Standards, but the units are appropriate for middle through high school students. The essential question that began this blog is this: How have the Maya responded to signs of change, and what can the Maya teach us about tradition, cooperation, and democracy? However, it expanded to other units that also seek to find the lessons of modernity -- or the belief that knowledge, the economy, technology and even our selves are capable of never-ending improvement. That said, our work is to uncover the darker side of such progress, which is also complex and shows how we are implicated in the lives of people all over the world. The format of these units is mostly inquiry-based, but we hold onto the core of our discipline, which is narrative. History is a narrative just as stories are, so we need to see any story as having gaps that prompt questions and further inquiry.

For the Maya unit, students will learn about cooperation through inquiry by beginning with a central text, developing comprehension and literary analysis skills while reading the central text, and then filling in the narrative gaps with additional inquiry researching a variety of genres. The summative assessment will enact this principle by presenting their research through multiple genres and then sharing their findings in a oral presentation and gallery walk. I try variations of this with each unit.

1. Thus, the first learning goal is to understand that knowledge is constructed by and through multiple sources. For this reason, we will do fishbowl and socratic seminars throughout the 3 weeks . The summative writing and speaking assessment is a multigenre project (see Romano’s Blending Genre, Altering Style or many websites) that synthesizes various sources to answer our essential question using multiple genres. Students are free to select from a variety of topics.

2. The second goal is to consider what different genres do to help us understand Maya experiences; thus, students will be able to examine the structure, authorial language, and authenticity of historical fiction and testimonio and to analyze what impact each has on the reader’s experience.In reading various texts, students will practice comprehension skills, identify and analyze literary devices, and trace the theme of cooperation. The summative reading assessment is a written assessment about figurative language, vocabulary in context, dialogue, and genre.

3.The third goal is to enact inclusivity, participation and critical engagement -- pillars of thick democracy. The texts in this unit captures the resilience of people and the value of cooperation. By focusing on Maya genocide of the early 1980s and exploring their culture, American students can learn the true meaning of cooperation and gain a greater sense of democratic living while also celebrating the resilience of a people. We will see how the Maya maintain their cultural foundation while making modern adaptation.

The novel, Tree Girl, is the central text, so the study guide here follows this book chapter by chapter indicating places for additional inquiry. Students will do inquiry during workshop time and keep notes in their research journals. The testimonio of I, Rigoberta Menchu, and numerous documentary and other media resources capture the social structures that created oppression in Guatemala and the mechanisms people used to resist and maintain traditions such as coops for farming and weaving and integrating Catholicism with indigenous religion. The two books are also a source of comparison as we think about how we learn about history.

As we see in Grandin's book, "Repression severed alliances between reforming elites and popular classes, disaggregated powerful collective movements into individual survival strategies, extracted leaders from their communities, and redefined the relationship between human beings and society" (196). However, individuals, especially activists like Rigoberta Menchu, while extracted did not remain isolated. Out of such manifestations grew a new way of thinking that resisted oppression –granito de arena. This metaphor for cooperation is a powerful message for any democratic society and is particularly relevant for developing classroom ethos. Guatemala advanced democracy not through autonomy or isolated freedom but rather a "collective action laid bare the social foundations of self" (181). This, I think, is what is worth knowing and teaching in our schools; this notion of democracy is worth contemplating, and so this unit attempts to explore these notions by using stories as points of access for these young thinkers.

Ganito de arena – a humble phrase that says “ I alone can’t change things. But I can HELP to change things." It’s a collective concept of change! It signifies a process that change can take many forms. It comes through struggle that unites collective rights and individual rights. What I give is only a tiny contribution (as with all the people we will meet in this unit). There are no heroes, but when the hand of destiny touches you, you have to act – you don’t have a choice.

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Monday, September 24, 2012

Discovering Dominga Joins the Conversation

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