Past projects 2
SEL & Social Justice in YA Novels
Funded Mar 14, 2022I’m grateful for these COVID relief funds and what those funds make available through the state of Arizona. I am excited for my students to see these new titles and for us to read and grow together. The pandemic has presented challenges, and with support, students are up to them!”
With gratitude,
Ms. Parker
Art Spiegelman's MAUS: Picturing Our Future Through Our Past
Funded Aug 13, 2012Thank you for your kind and generous sponsorship of our co-taught sophomore English classroom. Your support in the form of 35 copies of Art Spiegelman's graphic novel, MAUS: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History made a direct and significant impact on me, my co-teacher, and our 34 diverse students.
We began the MAUS unit with an introduction to graphic novels as a genre. Students studied pages from novels like Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and The Odyssey by Gareth Hinds. Students had just completed a long unit on Homer's The Odyssey and we had often referred to Hinds' book for both clarification of difficult concepts and extension of those ideas. Students also studied Plato's Allegory of the Cave, which is a challenging text as you know. During that unit groups of students drew huge timelines of Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato's lives. They also created individual pictorial depictions of The Allegory of the Cave. By the time we were ready to crack open our brand new books, students were well versed in using picture to tell story.
Still, I don't think students were quite prepared for the emotional, visceral impact of Spiegelman's story. We actually read MAUS aloud to students as they followed in their own texts, stopping along the way to engage in student-driven discussions -- both about Art Spiegelman as a a creator and about his parents and their story of the Holocaust. When we finished reading MAUS, we asked students to write a long contemplation of how Plato's Allegory of the Cave and Spiegelman's MAUS might be connected. These timed writing, which served as students' final "exams," exhibited the most provocative writing and thinking we had seen by our students yet.
We refer to MAUS often, both its form and its content. Many of our students went on to find and read MAUS II on their own. Everyone in the class is looking forward to our future study of another powerful book set in Europe during WWII, Soldier X by Don Wulffson.
My co-teacher and I are so grateful for your generosity. On behalf of our classroom and its students, we thank you.”
With gratitude,
Ms. Parker