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Lifeline (key stage 4)
Respect for all: Lifeline
This activity was used with pupils in key stage 4, year 10.
Context
Approximately 96 per cent of the pupils in this inner-city school are from minority ethnic groups. The main languages are Turkish, Gujarati, Panjabi, Bengali, Urdu and Yoruba, although, in total, 43 community languages are represented. Seventy-five per cent of pupils have English as an additional language.
Aim
- To increase pupils' understanding of cultural identity, and of how it can develop and change as a result of changes in time and place.
Activity objectives
- To discuss the effects of two different cultures on a poet's identity.
- To discuss the issues of fusion and/or confusion of cultures.
- To develop pupils' confidence in talking about their own cultural heritage in a multicultural society.
This activity relates to the following key stage 3 and 4 programme of study requirements for Reading:
- learning about how language is used in imaginative, original and diverse ways (1g);
- learning about how techniques, structure, forms and styles vary (1j);
- comparing texts, looking at style, theme and language, and identifying connections and contrasts (1k).
Activity description
Three poems were studied in this unit:
- Presents From My Aunts in Pakistan by Moniza Alvi;
- Search For My tongue by Sujata Bhatt;
- Half-Caste by John Agard.
These were accompanied by focused language work, which was firmly grounded in the national curriculum for English, on:
- how to integrate English and another language or dialect into written work;
- how writers use language(s) to create a specific atmosphere or mood;
- what makes a good beginning and ending (using Meera Syal's Life isn't all ha ha hee hee and JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye as models);
- what makes a description effective (involving a close study of adjectives, adverbs, punctuation, etc in two contrasting texts).
As part of this work, the pupils explored the notion of culture by creating individual collages to be displayed on the wall. With titles such as 'Ghana', 'Youth culture', 'My cultural heritage', 'Greek culture' and 'Irish culture', the collages represented, in colourful and dramatic form, the pupils' attempts to demonstrate some of the influences on their lives through words and images. Nearly all the collages combined images from more than one culture.
The teacher reminded the class that many pupils had something in common with her by having backgrounds influenced by two cultures. In Presents From My Aunts in Pakistan, the poet Moniza Alvi talks about the confusion she felt as a child towards her dual heritage. The teacher stressed that the poem was written in the 1960s and that many people today have successfully fused the two cultures they inherited.
To help the pupils focus on the concepts of fusion and/or confusion, she showed them a short clip from the film East is East, warning them in advance of the stereotypical nature of some of the characterisation and stressing that this film is set in the 1970s. The pupils noted aspects of Asian or British culture in the clip, and where examples of cultural confusion arose. For instance, they discussed the father's feelings as he attempted to arrange marriages for his two sons, recognising the conflicting emotions he was experiencing.
The film helped the pupils to focus on some of the key messages in Moniza Alvi's poem. They commented on the poet's feelings of confusion about her identity and nationality, and her pain at the reactions of her school friends to the beautiful salwar kameez sent by her aunts in Pakistan.
Extension activities were included to challenge the most able pupils. In addition, the teacher gave a pupil with special educational needs prompts to help her summarise the subject matter of the poem.
The class continued to work on the poems in subsequent lessons, studying in detail the use of simile, metaphor and free verse to express emotion.
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After studying the various texts, pupils interviewed an older member of their family and produced their lifeline (see lifeline example, right). They then selected one incident from the chosen person's life history and wrote it up in much greater detail. |
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Commentary
The pupils were clearly engaged with this topic, which showed that the issues raised were of considerable relevance to their lives. They were able to discuss openly and calmly issues such as racism in society, cultural difference, their pride in their own cultural heritage and their conviction that they had successfully fused two (or more) cultures. One pupil said, 'I'm half Italian, and half Trinidadian and Greek. My mum speaks two languages but she's normal, and I just speak English'. The students had no desire to deny their culture, or change their names or accents, as had the two boys in East is East.
Follow-up activities
Following the success of this unit of work at key stage 4, the English department is now reviewing its key stage 3 curriculum so that issues of race and identity can be found in work across the year groups.
The first step will be to add a range of activities to existing units of work. Examples include:
- using James Berry’s A thief in the village in a year 7 short stories unit to show how patois can be integrated effectively in a story;
- including in a year 8 poetry unit a poem in Turkish written by a pupil. Pupils could be asked to listen to the poem and explain why they know it is not a shopping list, identifying aspects such as tone, repetition and rhythm;
- adding a poem in Bengali to a year 9 love poetry unit;
- critically comparing the lifestyles portrayed by the two major film industries, Hollywood and Bollywood as part of a key stage 4 media unit.
Resources
Agard, J, Half-Caste
Alvi, M, Presents From My Aunts in Pakistan
Bhatt, S, Search For My Tongue
Salinger, JD, The Catcher in the Rye
Syal, M, Life isn't all ha ha hee hee
East is East, directed by Damien O'Donnell, Miramax 2002
The online national curriculum can be found at www.nc.uk.net