Unit Planning Brainstorming

1. I will be part of a group that is developing a freshman-level composition class that explores the theme of “The American Dream.” The class meets for 50 minutes, 3 times per week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. This broad topic provides an opportunity for exploring a number of interesting sub-themes, such as “income inequality and democracy,” “educational opportunity,” “changing patterns in marriage,” “educational opportunity,” “twenty-somethings and the Dream,” “debates over welfare,” and “racial inequality.” The topic of the American Dream is relevant to students' lives today, especially given the increasingly difficult prospect that our students will realize this Dream, or will achieve upward social mobility, within their lifetimes.

Our group will be working on two units, both placed at the start of the semester in order to introduce students to the broader topic of The American Dream. We will then focus on several sub-topics that relate to this theme. Subsequent units will each explore one of these topics and will incorporate longer and more complex readings. Essay assignments will also become more complex, moving from personal narrative to a close reading of a text, to compare-and-contrast, to a research essay requiring synthesis of multiple texts. All units will be related to the course theme of the American Dream. A preliminary outline of the units is:

Unit 1: The American Dream and Inequality

Unit 2: Educational Opportunity and Twenty-somethings

Unit 3: The Changing Face of Marriage

Unit 4: The Welfare Debate

Unit 5: Racial Inequality and/or Immigration

2. Jim N. and I will be working on Unit 1: The American Dream and Inequality, which will be the first unit in the composition class. Katie Bliss and Susan Partlan will be working on Unit 2, on twenty-somethings and educational opportunity.

The skills/activities will include brainstorming, including free-writing on students’ own views of the American Dream and inequality, coming up with key questions on these topics, and learning how to cite personal experience as evidence in an essay. The unit would incorporate community-building activities and introduce important aspects of the reading and writing processes such as annotation, citing sources in MLA Style, writing thesis statements, and writing paragraphs in P.I.E. format.

Students would begin by reading “The American Dream: A Biography,” and “What Happens to the American Dream in a Recession?,” and analyzing iconic visual images of the American Dream in Week 1. In Week 2, they would read news articles and op-eds on poverty and inequality in America, examining theories of why inequality is growing worse and why social mobility has stagnated (Timothy Noah’s book The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It has useful chapters on this). They would also read two chapters from Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, and they would then discuss how each text relates to the realization of the American Dream.

The first essay assignment will ask students to analyze their personal experience with the American Dream and inequality, and to connect this experience to one of the texts from the unit. It will primarily be a personal narrative, with personal experience used as evidence, but it will ask students to identify how their own experience relates to a text assigned during the unit and to cite details from their experience and the text to support their thesis.

3. See the next blog posting for the grid for the unit.