Teaching Multicultural Literature
Fall 2004 Semester
Education 195B Section 2
109 Dwinelle Hall
Dale Allender

MULTICULTURAL HISTORY COLLAGE

Standard #4
Students adjust their use of spoken, written, and visual language (e.g., conventions, style, vocabulary) to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences and for different purposes.
--NCTE and IRA Standards for the English Language Arts

Due: October 20 at the Start of Class
Presentation: October 20 during class

This is a group project based on your reading in Carla Blank’s Rediscovering America: The Making of Multicultural America, 1900-2000. Collectively, your group will create a detailed and complex visual representation of the content from the decade covered in this book that your group selects. In class we have talked about the relationship between historic events and the development of multicultural literature (check your syllabus for specific examples). The collage should represent historic events as they relate to the writing, publishing, reading and teaching of multicultural literature. Not every event listed will have an immediately clear connection to multicultural literary development. You may need to do a little outside reading to dig into an event more carefully and discover or construct the relationship.

Your group can approach this task in a number of ways. You might consider focusing on one event in particular, such as the publishing of Zora Neale Hurston’s 1938 book Tell My Horse (noted on page 161) as 1) a contributing factor in the development and exploration of African myth and African American folklore in African American literature generally 2) inspiration for Alice Walker and Ishmael Reed’s individual explorations of myth in their literature 3) an early example of the relationship among critical ethnography and fiction 4) influential material later republished alongside other Hurston texts which eventually made their way into mainstream high school and university English language arts classrooms as required reading. In this way the images that you select and bring together will all be rooted in or somehow related to this specific event. You will likely need to do a little outside reading to flesh out Blank’s reference on page 161 and thus be able to locate strong representative imagery.

Your group can also choose to focus on several events or the entire decade.

The collage does not need to be the traditional cut paper or textured project. You can explore digitized images and construct a collage based on available clip art on the Internet or from some other source. You can also consider a sound or moving image montage. You are not required to be creative in this way. It is more important to focus on the historic event or events you choose to cover and clearly connect them to the literary development and classroom instruction.

This project is worth 20 points assigned according to the following categories:

1. Content is clear (historic event or events are clearly distinguished; causal or correlational relationships among the historic event or events and the writing, publishing, and reading of multicultural literature are clearly discernable--logical or intuitive; instructional implications clear and thorough).  8pt

2. Production is unique and interesting; nothing is missing, falling apart, or somehow garbled making it difficult to engage the content. There are a variety of words and images combined in such a way as to convey the ideas your group is trying to present. (It might be helpful to write out a thesis statement about your collage in advance in order to guide your reading, clippings, and composition or arrangement.). The imagery should also clearly represent the diversity of the topic you are covering—historically and pedagogically. 4pt

3. The readings clearly relate to your images. This means you should include a bibliography of sources that informed the content and production. The bibliography should include two or three additional sources beyond Carla Blank’s book. This might mean readings from the other class selections. Your additional sources can also be from other media or popular culture. Include the bibliography on the back of the collage if it is appropriate to do so.  4pt

4. Presentation of your collage extends the initial visual understanding of your group work.  4pt