In my fourth grade classroom we were doing this unit in the beginning of the year so we used this as an opportunity to build self confidence and mutual respect. As for Liav’s classroom, that unit fell later in the year. She therefore, had already established the tone of respect in her classroom community.
First we had to define this new term for our students. I chose to jump into defining the term with the kids. They mentioned the secret identities of super heroes and from there we used dictionaries and personal definitions to understand the term. In Liav’s classroom, the students explored stereotypes first. She began with an exercise where students had to fill in the blanks to the prompt: “All _______ are _______.” Organically, the students wrote about stereotypes with comments like “All Mexicans are smelly.”
We brainstormed different categories of identity (i.e. religion, gender, language spoken, country of origin). I often felt that children didn’t have words for things they knew and felt about themselves. In order to give words to these feelings, we had a lot of class and individual discussions. For example, many students could not tell me their religion. So, students described holidays they celebrated and then we discussed which religion connected to that holiday. We also looked at college applications in order to see that people are often asked to check off a box to explain their racial identity. We used as many real life examples to show how and when we are asked about our identity. I also addressed that we are made up of a lot of different identities, not just one. We hoped that by highlighting the range of identities, we can see ourselves as complex and unique. Again, this is working towards promoting positive self-identity.
In Reading Workshop, children looked at identities in their independent reading books by closely examining their characters’ identities. Simultaneously, children were looking closely at their own identities. In my classroom students made “Identity Trading Cards” as a way to demonstrate that some Identities in your life seem more powerful or valuable to you than others. Similarly, some trading cards seem more valuable. In Liav’s classroom other art projects were developed with the same objectives in mind. Children were able to really take ownership of their own identities as well as see similarities in their friends and classmates.
Throughout this unit the main problem we encountered in the early stages was understanding that identity was something that was more fixed and categorized; it was different than a character trait. Fourth and fifth graders, alike, struggled with this idea. This was mostly discussed during Reading Workshop. We used a variety of graphic organizers to list our main character’s traits vs. identities.
