Term

Summer 2021

Capstone

Capstone Project

Degree Name

MAT

Facilitator(s)

Jana Lo Bello Miller

Content Expert

Andy Maurer

Abstract

In our current society, there is a growing need for educators to approach curriculum with the knowledge and awareness of the inequities that affect our students based on how they identify. The exploration of student identity in the classroom not only encourages reflection on how students are placed in the context of social justice issues but also promotes the reflection of educators who teach through a social justice lens. This capstone project focuses on the research question: How can curriculum be designed to place student identity in the context of social justice issues through creative writing and reading in an English Language Arts classroom? This project examines the current approaches and resources for social justice pedagogy and how using creative writing in an English Language Arts classroom can promote identity exploration and critical thinking of social justice issues. The result of the research concludes with a project that is a 12 week curriculum design of a creative writing unit for an ELA classroom. The unit focuses on reading, discussing and writing about social justice issues and identity and is broken into mini units based on three genres of creative writing: poetry, nonfiction and fiction. It can be concluded through this project that integrating identity exploration through writing and analyzing texts with a social justice focus has the potential for enhancing student growth in communication skills and their understanding of their voice in conversations surrounding social justice.

Project Type

Curriculum

dc_type

text

dc_publisher

DigitalCommons@Hamline

dc_format

application/pdf

dc_source

School of Education Student Capstone Projects

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