Extended Analysis: 6-Word Memoirs on Slave Resistance
Context & AnalysisI recently borrowed an activity more typically used in English classes to help my 10th grade African American History students to get into a “first-person” mindset. We are in the middle of a unit on Slavery, which my classroom mentor and I have designed to cover 4 themes: experience, business, resistance, and abolition in slavery. The unit also explores 6 successive phases of slavery, from initial capture to internal relocation. In the current lesson , students explored the topic of “resistance” in slavery by reading WPA narratives of ex-slaves recorded in the 1930s, when the former slaves were 70 to 121 years old. The lesson I designed to introduce the concept of resistance in slavery started and ended with students’ voices, with some concerted independent reading in between. The exercise on which this artifact reflects—the writing of 6-word memoirs—asks students to write on a specific topic, or in response to a specific text, using only 6 words. The words may be connected in a sentence or phrases, or they may be disconnected from one another. The goal is for students to render a text or concept in their own words, and in a concise manner.
The day’s Warm Up asked students to list 10 ways that they can resist their parents’/guardians’ power. This question generated a lot of excitement among students, who were eager to share out their answers. We compiled a class list on the board, with about 30 examples from the class. I then posed the question, What are some general labels could we use to categorize this list? Students offered suggestions such as “violent,” “non-violent,” and “internal,” “external,” but we landed on “direct” and “indirect” resistance. With those categories in mind, I transitioned immediately into the reading activity, and was floored to observe the class switch from a very vocal, excited state to silence—it appeared that students were hooked, and transitioned smoothly into their independent work. As they read, they took notes on a graphic organizer (in this case, a chart) that I had had them copy into their notebooks the previous day. They collected 10 examples of resistance (indirect or direct) by enslaved people against the institution of slavery. I used the 6-word memoir writing activity to wrap up class on this day—it pulled together the lesson fantastically. I wanted students to write from the perspective of an enslaved person, not from the perspective of the 2013 self commenting on the experience of slaves in the past. My instructions read, Write a 6-word memoir from the perspective of a slave about an act of resistance. Before sending them off, I re-emphasized that they were not writing from their own perspectives, but as if they were slaves doing the resisting. Students wrote responses that demonstrated they were able to take on a perspective that truly was not their own. Here are a few: · Bite my tongue, leave evil world · I need to steal that gun! · I’m a human, not an animal · I cannot escape bounds of madness · Y’all ain’t gonna find me runnin · Massa’ is gon’ beg fo’ life · Talk back, beaten, still talk back · Asked me to spy, I spy back · Misunderstood because of my skin color · Hope in heart, people won’t know · Slavery only as cruel as master · Not wrong if you’re not caught |
Connection To InquiryThis artifact affirms and furthers my inquiry in the dimensions of curriculum and pedagogy more successfully than any other I’ve generated so far. The 6-word memoirs demonstrate students’ ability to abandon the “presentism ” that typically afflicts teenage students. The examples show students transferring the concept of resistance—as either a direct or an indirect act—from something they read about another individual, to something they could express, as if it were their own. I am tempted to use the word “authentic ” to describe the nature of their 6-word memoirs, because they read so genuinely as students’ own, and because their process for creating them was quite self-directed.
As I consider possible reasons why this exercise succeeded at getting students to use the “first person” to adopt a perspective that is not their own, I realize that the first-person orientation of the WPA narratives modeled the very perspective that students’ 6-word memoirs had to take on. Throughout the lesson, there was continuity in the first-person, although 3 different applications: the opener asked students to identify ways they, themselves, could resist their parents’/guardians’ power, the main activity asked students to read narratives that were documented in the first person, and the closing activity asked students to borrow the slaves’ first-person stance to fictionalize possible resistance efforts. If the WPA narratives had been documented in the third person, would the 6-word memoir exercise have worked? Looking ahead, I wonder whether I need to use texts in class whose verbiage aligns with the perspective I’m aiming for students to take on. Or, could the parallelism of first-person perspective in this lesson be a sound scaffold for moving to subsequent activities wherein students read about an issue or event in the third person, but still I ask them to configure a response or analysis in the first person? The apparent success of this lesson encourages me to continue on with this inquiry (although it might take some years to establish verifiable methods.) The artifact also helps me clarify the focus of my inquiry, again, as this process becomes truly generative. What strikes me in my students’ work is not what I thought I was looking for: I believed I was focusing on the effect of various classroom activities on students’ self-conception as individuals (inside and beyond the classroom,) but what I am finding is more deeply rooted in students’ experience of the curriculum itself. I am finding evidence of moments where students are either successful or unsuccessful at shifting perspectives. In some cases this is about recognizing the boundaries of their own perspectives, as individuals in 2013, and staying situated therein; in other cases this is about their ability to abandon their own perspective and take on the perspective of an individual in history, including their beliefs, customs, and historically-appropriate details. This applies to real and imagined individuals. As I begin to be able to make sense of what works in my classroom, and why, my interest in students’ “self-conception” and “individual agency” is less apparent in my artifacts, while the pedagogical need for students to be able to recognize “perspective” in history re-emerges. Please refer to the artifact analysis, “Evolution of the Inquiry Question,” for more thoughts on this shift of focus. |