Krystal Wu Fox Girl: Unit Overview 1. Essential Question How do narratives create and inform who we are?

What power do we have to create and recreate narratives? Who gets to tell stories, and who doesn't? These questions seem essential to me in our study because stories are an integral part of students' lives though they may not be fully aware of just how deeply narratives are woven into what we believe and are taught. Discussing the differences between narratives and discourse (between the story's content and its implications or wider effects) will offer students a critical perspective on not only the texts we read in class, but also the wider community of which they are a part. The IB curriculum stresses that students learn how to be flexible, careful, and close readers, and I believe that these questions will frame our study to support students in their becoming critical readers of social and historical narratives as well. I think discussing the different roles of stories and narratives will be engaging because there are many ways that we can connect these ideas to the world outside of class. Thinking about how stories have shapedand continue to shapeus will offer students the opportunity to reflect on their upbringings and their lives in productive and critical ways. Some ways I plan to engage my students in this unit include drawing on the stories and narratives they have heard as young people, discussing folklore and different kinds of folktales, connecting the text to social issues in the community (specifically sex trafficking), bringing in guest presenters, responding to the text through creative writing, and using a variety of media (various texts, audio, video, images, online resources). 2. Central Text / Supplemental Texts The central text for my unit is Nora Okja Keller's Fox Girl, which is a novel about young women growing up in post-war Korea. In choosing this text, I thought about what the other texts we would be reading this semesterTim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and Bao Ninh's The Sorrow of War both offered and lacked. The above two novels both describe the Vietnam War from different points of view: O'Brien's from an American G.I. perspective and Ninh's from a North Vietnamese perspective. Both authors served in the Vietnam War, and their novels mostly reveal the horrors of wargenerally speaking and specifically in Vietnamboth during and after the conflict. Neither novel offers its readers a deep insight into how war affects women. Fox Girl seemed like the perfect complement to these two rich texts. Keller is a Korean American author whose novel looks specifically at what happens after a war has come and gone in a country. She raises important questions in her text that are not fully engaged in O'Brien's or Ninh's, such as: How is war waged on women's bodies? How did the American G.I. presence manifest itself in

insidious ways post-war in Vietnam and Korea (and how does the U.S. continue to colonize the developing world in this way?) What happens to the children fathered by American soldiers in postwar countries? Though Fox Girl is a difficult book to read (it has graphic language and disturbing scenes of sexual violence), I think it will prove to be a rich and important study for my students. My hope is that we are able to create a classroom culture of compassion and empathy so that we can really delve into thinking about the importance of other perspectives and narratives in literature and life. Other supplemental texts I will use include a Korean children's picture book, original Korean folktales, Gloria Anzalda's To Live in the Borderlands Means You, Comfort Women Speak for its first-person accounts of sexual slavery by the Japanese military, the Bedford Glossary of Literary Terms, Bennett and Royle's Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, Still Present Pasts (an online interactive art exhibit), among others. I am also inviting two presenters to share their expertise with my class: Annie Rovzar from the University of San Francisco's MFA in Creative Writing program and Sam Baker from Not For Sale Campaign, a non-profit whose mission is to abolish human trafficking worldwide. 3. Learning Objectives / State Standards My learning goals for my students include the following: -Students will be able to explain the concept of narrative and will be able to discuss the different forms and levels of narrative that exist in literature and in society. -Students will read texts from different points of view and will discuss the importance of perspective of writers and narrators in text. -Students will critically analyze the social narratives put forth in the discourse of traditional folklore, the American Dream, and the United States as a nation at war. -Students will maturely and compassionately discuss difficult literature. -Students will engage with their local community and see how sexual slavery continues to happen today. -Students will be introduced to the Korean War as the Forgotten War and some history of the comfort women by reading primary source documents and relating them to Fox Girl. -Students will play with their own home languages as Keller and Anzalda do through experimental, creative writing. -Students will connect Fox Girl to The Things They Carried through writing and discussion regarding the history of the Korean and Vietnam War. -Students will annotate texts for literal and figurative language, narrative content and narrative meaning, personal reactions, and questions. -Students will write a critical essay in which they engage their thinking regarding different perspectives, synthesize their knowledge of Fox Girl and The Things They Carried, and practice writing creatively.

The state standards I will address for ELA include:

Reading 2.4 Make warranted and reasonable assertions about the authors arguments by using elements of the text to defend and clarify interpretations. 2.5 Analyze an authors implicit and explicit philosophical assumptions and beliefs about a subject. 3.6 Analyze the way in which authors through the centuries have used archetypes drawn from myth and tradition in literature, film, political speeches, and religious writings (e.g., how the archetypes of banishment from an ideal world may be used to interpret Shakespeares tragedy Macbeth). Writing 2.2 Write responses to literature: 1. Demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of the significant ideas in works or passages. 2. Analyze the use of imagery, language, universal themes, and unique aspects of the text. 3. Support important ideas and viewpoints through accurate and detailed references to the text and to other works. 4. Demonstrate an understanding of the authors use of stylistic devices and an apprecia tion of the effects created. 5. Identify and assess the impact of perceived ambiguities, nuances, and complexities within the text. Listening and Speaking 1.1 Recognize strategies used by the media to inform, persuade, entertain, and transmit culture (e.g., advertisements; perpetuation of stereotypes; use of visual representations, special effects, language).

The state standards I will address for ELD include:

Organization and Delivery of Oral Communication -Negotiate and initiate social conversations by questioning, restating, soliciting information, and paraphrasing the communication of others. Reading: Vocabulary and Concept Development -Apply knowledge of academic and social vocabulary while reading independently. -Be able to use a standard dictionary to find the meanings of unfamil iar words. -Interpret the meaning of unknown words by using knowledge gained from previously read text. -Understand idioms, analogies, and metaphors in conversation and written text. Writing -Develop a clear thesis and support it by using analogies, quotations, and facts appropriately. -Write a multiparagraph essay with consistent use of standard grammatical forms.

To further support my heterogenous students, I plan to provide a lot of individual attention and

scaffolding. For instance, with the jigsaw assignment, I will offer shorter stories to my students who struggle with reading so that they will able to succeed in being true experts on their stories, and I will offer the longer stories to my students who think my class is too slow, so that they will have an extra challenge. I will also make sure to check in with students as we read to see how successfully they are completing the reading assignments. Other than reading, most of the work we do will be done in class, and there is always something that students can contribute, regardless of achievement level. I ask for oral participation from almost all students almost every day, which has seemed to decrease the anxiety around speaking out loud in front of their peers. Since there is time to read and reread in class, I feel certain that most studentsregardless of reading abilitywill be able to fulfill the reading assignments with confidence. (I will also build in extra Silent Sustained Reading time if I feel it is necessary. It is important that students read this novel in context, so I am going to stress the importance of full reading.)

4. Unit Calendar See attached. 5. Assessment The assessments I have in mind for my unit include: -Collection of reader's notes on a random basis to check in on students' interactions with texts and to motivate students to keep up with the reading. -Weekly vocab exercise assignments and monthly vocab quizzes to encourage consistent learning of vocabulary and study skills. -Collection of student journals every couple weeks to check in on students' participation in class, to encourage attendance, and to interact with students' in-journal writing and reflections. -Almost daily class discussions to see how closely students are reading, to make sure that I am able to model critical and empathetic ways to engage with the book before we all move on in the text, and to encourage students to read by hooking them with interesting and lively class discussions. -In-class creative writing to support students as they try on other characters' points of view and play with different languages. -Final project essay in which students either trace a narrative strand through Fox Girl or connect one of the quotes we've talked about in class to Fox Girl.