Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month

This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.

I am a tenth grade English as a second language instructor in New York City. The high school in which I teach is a low income school that is composed of a beautiful patchwork of international students who hail from over thirty different countries. While our students come from many different places, it is our shared stories of immigration, which bind our community, and the large majority of the ESL population are first generation immigrants. I often share my own immigration story– I came from Germany to the U.S.A. at the age of five– in my ESL Non-Fiction Studies course. I have found that my students are able to relate to the feelings of anxiety and displacement that are part of building a life in a new country. In fact, as we read excerpts from Anne Frank’s diary last year, I saw my students connect with Anne's struggles as she and her family escaped the Nazis and immigrated from Germany to Holland. This project was such a success that I would like to expand upon it by obtaining copies of Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl for each student. However, drastic budget cuts by New York City’s Department of Education have made it impossible to order new books and supplies at my school. Funding my project requires outside donations. With the help of your funding, my ESL students will be able to learn about the historical context of Anne's diary, make personal connections with the text, utilize diary writing to explore their own creative tendencies, and strengthen their writing and analytical skills. I would also like to incorporate daily journal writing in my class as a tool for reflection and a deeper connection with the text and so that my students can write about their individual experiences with immigration. Last December, my students wrote their own diary entries which recounted their memories of leaving their home country and immigrating to the U.S. My students wrote profound and emotional pieces, which included feelings of apprehension, anticipation, and hope for new beginnings. However, their writings were not cohesive and organized since they were gathered together on sheets of loose leaf paper. In fact, it is rare that my students have a book, notebook, or diary that they can call their own. That is why I would like to provide each student with their own personal diary so that they can expand their writing about their experiences with immigration and connect their observations to Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. For my ESL students, having their own diary would create a sense of ownership as they continue to hone in on their craft as young writers. In conjunction with the reading and writing exercises, the unit I have planned on Anne Frank will focus on Anne's enduring hopefulness. The students will read and experience Anne’s struggles to overcome her apprehension that the Secret Annexe will be discovered by the Nazis, her terror as she is surrounded by the sounds of war, and the sadness that surfaced as she began to sense that her pre-war freedom and childhood was rapidly slipping away. Anne Frank is a voice of agency for my students who know firsthand what it is like to be discriminated against in their home countries and in the United States. After everything that Anne went through, she was still able to gain strength through her cathartic, and often literary, diary writing. Anne Frank wrote: “Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.” Your donations with help provide my students with the profound, moving words of Anne Frank and diaries that can help them fully experience the cathartic and empowering qualities of their own writing.