This summer, Ms. Turman and Ms. Maldonado attended the AP Summer Institute in English Literature and Composition. The program was structured around a social justice framework, in which teachers had the opportunity to discuss culturally relevant pedagogies, and to learn the nuts and bolts of the AP exam. The teachers tried out lots of sample activities, many of which Ms. Turman plans to further develop and use in the classroom this year. She also took away some great ways to structure teaching and learning for the entire English Department, including specific protocols the department is going to follow, which will equip our students to engage in deeper analysis and understanding.
The teachers formed four groups, which each developed and taught a 30-minute lesson. Ms. Turman’s group taught a lesson linking two of the books they had read for the institute, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me and Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give with W.E.B. DuBois’ theory of Double Consciousness.
“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others…One ever feels his twoness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
From The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois
This year, most of the teachers attending the institute were from NYC, but Ms. Turman and Ms. Maldonado also met one teacher from an international school in St. Petersburg, Russia and another who teaches on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in northwest Montana, home of the Blackfeet Nation, on of the ten biggest tribes in the United States. Ms. Turman established connections with many of the teachers who attended, and they are planning ways for their students to interact in future!