2023 Participant Text Sets

My multimodal text set is a collection of books, interviews, videos, photos, and music detailing the culture and events from the 1930’s through current day in Minnesota. I wanted to make connections for students and foster their interest in reading. I aspired to tell a history of African American students they are not seeing in their general education studies. My hope is to give my African American students a voice in our school community.

The state of Texas has seen an influx of migrant students coming from a variety of countries. The message that is often received by these students is that they should assimilate if they are to be successful in this new country. However, we chose to focus on the richness and uniqueness of the cultures most often represented in our classroom. This text set hopes to validate and celebrate the cultures of the largest groups of migrant students in Texas.

This text set is designed to provide a range of text options highlighting groups that are often invisible in the traditional curriculum. The AP US History Curriculum is divided into nine sections and covers a time period of over 500 years. Having time to engage students with different perspectives on history is challenging. This text set attempts to provide an overlooked or ignored perspective or story for each time period in the curriculum.

This text set focuses on the untold stories of Ecuadorian migrants to New York spread over the past 60 years. They share a story of resilience and resistance to the struggle of acculturation in a new land. Told through first person narratives, documentaries, children books and novels, photographs and songs, these stories are meant to shed light on the lived experiences of these migrants and uplift all those who connect to these stories.

Each section is written as a larger framing of human rights with ties to both a humanities focus on migration and world history, along with a science study of the human body systems. In North Carolina standard course of study these two topics coincide in the 7th grade curriculum. The six frames are: The Right to Eat Our Own Foods; The Right to Reproductive Freedom; The Right to Be Safe in Our Bodies; The Right to Love and Be Loved; The Right to Maintain Our Connections to the Land; and The Right to Play.

This text set focuses on migration as a result of the period of decolonization in Africa and Asia following WWII. The set includes a case study of 3 countries/regions: Indian Independence and the partition of India that led to the creation of Pakistan, Kenyan Independence, and the location of Kenya as the site of refugee camps for Africans from across the continent, and Syria following its independence from France, and the current civil war and refugee crisis.

This text set is meant to capture the idea that migration is a constant in our lives. It is meant to underscore the fact that the lives of immigrants, refugees, and migrants are human stories that constitute human emotions and actions. These are stories we can use as we teach our students vital social and emotional learning skills. The set includes traditional books, videos, interviews, and PDF character maps.

This text set will compliment my 6th grade unit on identity and culture. It will also serve to welcome newcomers. Students will begin to understand that we are more alike than different, they will be able to critique the media and acknowledge the journey and struggles refugees face in order to better empathize with cultures.

Native American culture is rooted in oral history. For thousands of years, indigenous languages developed independently and in many cases alongside a neighboring tribe. In the past 500+ years, because of Anglo expansion across the continent, the native language has significantly diminished for a variety of reasons. Often, erasing the native language was a more ‘efficient’ way of removing, relocating, or extinguishing the people of this country. The focus of this text set is to explore the ways in which the indigenous voice, specifically Navajo or Diné, has been reclaimed and reinforced.

This set looks at texts representing countries around the world that my students come from. I was interested in finding stories of joy and real life from students' home countries, as opposed to stories that focus on push factors, displacement, and traumatic events. Many texts included directly relate to our ELA curriculum and can supplement or replace existing texts to make the content more relevant and accessible to my students.

This multimodal text set includes information in the form of videos, books, and photographs of the various groups of Native Americans of the Great Lakes Region over the span of several hundreds of years. The focus of these resources is primarily to expose my students to the Native Americans who lived in their state of Illinois as well as the surrounding areas and investigate how individuals contributed to the founding and development of Illinois.

This is a multimodal collection of texts and resources that highlight recent immigration and refugee stories in the Richmond, Virginia area. There is a focus on first-person accounts in order to highlight the uniqueness and diversity of individual experiences. The hope is that this text set can be used in schools around the Greater Richmond area to nurture understanding of the immigrant and refugee experience and elevate marginalized voices in the high school classroom.