EDDL258+Using+Resources+to+Bring+Primary+Sources+into+the+Classroom

//**A Clash of Culture: An examination of the impact of education in the formation of the human voice.**//

During tenth grade at Warwick High School, students read the well-known novel by John Steinbeck, //The Pearl,// and a "not-so-well-known" novel by Margaret Craven, //I Heard the Owl Call My Name.// Besides other themes, both novels have the theme of the importance of education. In //The Pearl,// the main character Kino dreams of providing his son with an education which consists of being able to read the law, history, and the Bible. Kino viewed education as a means of verifying the "truths" told to him and his people by the conquering Europeans and the Church as personified by the doctor and the priest. In //I Heard the Owl Call My Name,// the elders speak with remorse of time when there children leave the little village to go to the white man's school. They speak of the loss that the community feels as the young are educated away from the ways of their people, the language, the customs, the values. Neither book portrays the Native Americans in the manner to which students are used to seeing them...in movies and television shows...as submissive, illiterate, savage people. In prior years students have struggled with the idea of education as a means of indoctrination/assimilation. Although a few of my students are ELL students, most of my students are immersed in the local culture and are not conscious of the values that influence or color their thinking.

Following study of the novels students will examine the factors that have shaped their thinking—the culture from which they derive their values. They will utilize local resources to explore the background of the local culture in the small rural/suburban town in which they live. Students will write a research based personal narrative in which they tell their own story and the story of their culture.

We are fortunate that the remains of the Carlisle Indian School are close by so that my students can make the connection between themselves here in the East in the twenty-first century and the native people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Southwest and Northwest. Although students are not used to reading primary documents in English class...that's for social studies...I hope that the connection between the two studies and the two novels and their lives will become real to those participating in the lesson.

Objectives of A Clash of Culture  | Lesson Summary | State Standards | ISTE Standards | Bibliography