Will+Matthews

Below, I have two versions of my unit plan, //Native Voices//. They are the same text, but are in two different formats because I use Open Office as my primary word-processing tool. The first is in a ".doc" file which MS Word should have no problem opening and reading. The other format is the useful, versatile, and popular (though uneditable!) PDF format, which is nice because PDF documents are easily searchable, downloadable, and printable. I used one of my favorite books //West of the Thirties: Discoveries Among the Navajo and Hopi//, by Edward T. Hall, as my anchor text for the unit. I've read it many times, but I definitely discovered new things and found many hidden gems as I approached it from the angle of sharing, teaching, and exploring it with students. As I worked on the unit, it's scope definitely changed from exploring different marginalized groups in American society -- thus the original //American Voices// title -- to focusing on exploring Native American culture and writing, since two weeks isn't all that much time.











My article is about //The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn//, focusing on the challenges it present in teaching, and more broadly about our own biases, assumptions, and blind-spots in relation to books and subject matter that may be offensive or sensitive to some students.