Connecting Class with Life and Faith

Materials for our roundtable discussion last week, and the next step

A piece of Wednesday's socratic discussion, entirely run by students, in 11th grade AP English:

• For a community to be tight-knit, does it have to have a high degree of exclusion? For insiders to feel really in, do there have to be definite outsiders?
• Churches are highly inclusive without excluding anyone.
• That’s not always true.
• I know 2 kinds of Christians: the ones who say, “If you’re a Christian, I love you, and if you’re not, I don’t like you,” and the ones who say, “I love you because of who you are.”

After several students affirmed this and offered experiences on one side or the other, the facilitator summed up the thoughts: 

• So can we can agree that while Christians are humans and act in good and bad ways in community, that from here on when we talk about Christian community, the meaning in the ideal of community where anyone who comes can feel included? 

Though my school is a Christian school, the majority of students do not come from Christian homes, and this conversation was bipartisan, so to speak. I was pleased to see that this was the perspective of the students, that they could articulate it, and that they saw it as an important part of the conversation about the relationship of the individual to the community. 

“What is the relationship of the individual to the community” is the essential question for this quarter’s study. At the end of it students know they will respond to this prompt: “The author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. wrote, ‘What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.’ Write a speech that you would deliver to a group of your peers (identify which group) that uses Vonnegut’s idea as your main point and recommends ways to ‘create stable communities.’” (The Language of Composition 392, #9). (I love this textbook, by the way!)

So far we have read and discussed 9 short pieces related to the topic (see below if you’re interested in the list), and we needed to pause to reflect on and synthesize what we’d learned so far, and capture that thinking for later use before we launch into the major work for this unit: The Scarlet Letter. (We’ll continue thinking about the topic while reading the novel, and compose the speech when we are done.) To prepare for the discussion, I gave students a chart with the speech prompt at the top, a chart listing all 9 pieces we’ve read, and spaces to record a top take-away and response to that take-away from each piece. 

Before beginning the discussion, I reviewed with students the purpose, and it’s a good thing I remembered to do this because we weren’t all on the same page! I asked why we have these discussions, and the first answer was “So we can have this conversation in our own head on the test?” Actually, that’s why we do table group discussions of answers to multiple choice questions on critical reading selections. The next answer nailed it. It’s because we’re smarter together than we are alone. We have deeper insights when we offer them to the group for further response, refinement, connection, building, and modification. It’s not about what great insights you can share, but how we can listen to our peers, understand their perspectives, and build a little further. Offer what you have because it may be just the piece that joggles a great insight in someone else. I remind them that I am available for input if they want to direct a question to me, but other than that, I work really hard to keep quiet and let the students direct the discussion. We have a rubric for what good discussion looks like that we review use to self-assess and set goals periodically, so they know what to do.

Then I sat down. One student took the lead as facilitator, posing a question. Others responded. They were prepared, curious, engaged, actively listening, requesting and offering feedback, and building on each others’ answers. The discussion was great, also including such topics as the ways students have felt included or excluded based on language (we’re an English speaking school in Japan) and how to create an inclusive community. 

I’m excited that students are growing in their discussion and thinking skills. I’m interested to see how this particular discussion will shape our discussions of The Scarlet Letter. And I love that as second semester 11th graders, they begin to feel the approaching reality in a little over a year of leaving the community they’re part of and needing to find or create new ones. 

How do students connect your course content and skills to life and to faith?

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Appendix: Reading list for Individual and Community (from The Language of Composition, unless otherwise noted)

1. Biblical perspective: John Ortberg, “The Wonder of Oneness” (ch. 2), Everybody’s Normal till You Get to Know Them (pp. 27-43)
2. Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (280)
3. Richard Rodriguez, “Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood” (303)
4. Lori Arviso Alvord, “Walking the Path between Worlds” (316)
5. Robert D. Putnam, “Health and Happiness” (323)
6. Scott Brown, “Facebook Friendonomics” (342)
7. Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted” (344)
8. Aurora Levins Morales, “Child of the Americas” (poetry, 354)
9. Extended reading: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter