Endings: We read chapter 15 in Tree Girl. We started with the idea of "home" and what makes us feel at home. Students did a little journal-ing about the word "home." This is a theme in the last chapter, but the book really examines how globalization or big business redefines notions of home for people of the world, and Ben Mikaelsen, the author of Tree Girl, represents this logic.
At the beginning of the book, we learned that Gabi, the protagonist,felt at home high in the trees of the Guatemalan Highlands, but by the end of the book, she won't climb trees (and most trees were destroyed in the "Scorched Earth Policy"); her "home" has been destroyed by the government soldiers, and nearly all her family has been massacred. The author has to address this issue of physical loss but also a figurative loss of tradition and ancestral remains in the last chapter of the book. Gabi is faced with either going to America, fighting with the guerrillas, or staying in the refugee camp to be a teacher, but she doesn't see any of these options as helping her re-establish her "home." Because of modernity such as technology, development, and expansion of business in other countries, Gabi's home has been destroyed; she is repulsed by what America represents and values as she says: "It seemed very sad to me to think that some would so quickly trade the rich traditions of our Mayan past for the modern conveniences of a future America" (213). What will she do? Does she even have a choice about her future? Will she ever climb a tree again? Will little Alicia ever speak?
In a time of consumerism and individualism, students bear witness to Gabi's testimony and worldview considering the impact of globalization in both individuals and the collective peoples they represent.
The next step is for students to synthesize the past few weeks of inquiry. How can teachers assess this process of knowing? How can we measure students knowledge and learning? Here, I see knowledge as that which students can read; it is information. On the other had, I see what students have learned as being much more complex, more of an interpretation, and even the sort of questions that have emerged -- all evidence of learning. And so, how can we assess this? The unit or the learning cannot be multiple choice or concrete per se but rather must be consistent with the concept of genocide, which is rhetorical in nature, and inquiry, and narrative inquiry, which is all about opening spaces for further inquiry. Developing the "test," then, was a challenge for me. I had to resist ways of testing that have been part of education reform since I began teaching over eight years ago, methods anchored in the tradition of English textbooks (e.g.,multiple choice, matching, literary terms, and other concrete ways of knowing). Instead, I wanted to use the literary terms as a tool of analysis considering authorial strategies of artistic representation. The study guide was useful in helping students learn the literary tools in context and a way to alert students to how Mikaelsen was representing social values or using dialogue to show the multitude of voices the preceded and continue to impact the modern Maya. Thus, in this final assessment, students will use their notes from research of images and videos I took while in Guatemala in 2012, Tree Girl, their study guide from Tree Girl, and then notes from Discovering Dominga, and When Mountains Tremble to tell me about their experience bearing witness to not only Maya history but our (U.S.) own.
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