I'm diving into learning on the very first day of school! This summer I read Sara Ahmed's Being The Change and truly loved her identity web lesson. My students are 7th and 8th graders so I wanted to pick a text that would catch their attention. I looked at the texts Sara suggests in Being The Change but ultimately decided to go with a digital text that I found from Katherine Sokolowski's blog post: Building Relationships at the Start of the Year.
Katherine shared this Carhartt Handemade Film about Jason Mamoa called Canvas of My Life. I love it for lots of reasons and had already planned to show it as part of a community building art project but as I was thinking about identity, I realized this movie fits perfectly with Sara's identity web lesson. Here it is so you can watch it for yourself:
I'll ask students to watch and notice what we learn about Jason Mamoa and who he is. Based on Sara's lesson, we'll create an identity web for Jason based on evidence we find in the text, then I'll create one for myself, and finally, they'll have time to discuss and create their own identity webs. I'm toooootally simplifying this so you'll have to get a copy of Being The Change so you can read Sara explain this lesson in much more detail.
Building students' awareness of themselves and their identity is super important to me but I want my students to grow their understanding of how we fit into communities we belong to as well. Using this video for our identity webs will be a great foundation for our shared art project that invites students to develop their identity as a classroom community/team. More on that soon!
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