Mrs.

Jane Doe
Head of the Department
Sprinkle High School
February 15, 2015

Dear Madam,
I am writing to seek approval of adding a book into my Grade 9 English Language Arts curriculum.
The book entitled, Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson will not only be a thought
provoking, and entertaining read for the students but increase student discussion on meaningmaking. While many of the texts in class provide conversations on meaning-making, I believe the
students through this free-verse memoir will be able to not only make meaning of the text, but
better understand the structure of poetry through the free-verse writing.
Through my creation of a unit plan based around this text I have come up with the salient theme of,
Memory, with a unit entitled, A Hazy Memory. Through this text students will be able to explore
the form of story writing, how a persons memory and experience is shaped and influenced by their
place and social and economic status within society, and how society treats them. This unit will give
real-life situations, and provide students with ways to explore their own stories through the hazy
memory. Due to the book being a memoir it would be perfect for students to read a non-fiction
text that does not give them the same morals, major concepts and themes of most other novels.
The text along with providing themes gives actually accounts of things that occurred through
history. The historical aspect of the text will provide students with knowledge not only on the
literary elements, but the way that history helps tell the story. It is important that through text we
are able to provide our students with lessons, many lessons of which happen across disciplines. By
this text bringing in the civil rights and racial discrimination issues that occurred in America during
several parts of the book, the students are able to engage more with their feelings on particular
issues, whether it be verbal or in writing.
Multicultural texts give space for students to learn about other races, cultures, languages, genders,
and sexualities. Texts like Brown Girl Dreaming gives students a space to explore the life of an
African-American woman who grew up with too different situations in life, one in the north, the
other in the south. Many of the canonical texts fail to represent any other cultures, which no longer
depict those who are reading and learning within schools. It is important that students are able to
read books by those other than a singular race, or singular gender. While the students may have not
been in the exact same situation, the story of a girl growing up in a confusing world is something
that is extremely relatable to youth. The years of adolescents are confusing as the youth are always
trying to figure out how and why things are occurring, thus this book will appeal to their wondering
nature.
The most prominent exploration through Brown Girl Dreaming will be characterization and in what
ways the author is able to use characterization to tell a story. Everything within the book depends

on the memory of the character. Students will be able to take a journey with the author which will
implore them into assignments in which they explore their own memories as forms of writings.
There will be opportunities for students to read the text through different theoretical lens. Being
able to use theoretical lens during reading is a difficult thing to teach students when a text is too
dense with information, but Brown Girls Dreaming provides just enough material for a student to
use different Lens to observe. Reading the text through a gender, Marxist or reader response lens
will force students to dig deeper past shallow thoughts on the texts. They will be able to make
meaning that they otherwise may not have been able to do with canonical texts like Hamlet or Lord
of the Flies. This will force analysis to be more independent away from surface readings of text
which will force the students to become better at analysis writing.
This text will lead to many writing assignments along with descriptive discussions, and projects.
While there are multiple texts that can push students to surface understandings of themes, and
other literary elements this specific text will push several of the Common Core State Standards. For
instance, CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.2 deals with students determining central ideas and themes.
The text is filled with many things that could be sought out as the central idea which forces the
students to pick a theme and find supporting evidence to convince others that they have found the
strongest theme of the text, which coincides with CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.1 that focuses on
finding textual evidence. There are at least five other CCSS that can easily relate to this text, which
shows it has enough depth to be taught in a classroom, and the students will be learning in the
process several pertinent standards needed in the 9/10th grade classroom.
Finding supportive textual evidence is an important skill to learn across disciplines, on standardized
test, in research, etc. Due to this text not being a typical novels the students are not only finding
textual evidence but learning how to decipher meaning out of poetry. Brown Girl Dreaming
provides an easier avenue of learning how to make meaning out of poetry while using the lines in
the poems as textual evidence.
Attached I have provided a sample lesson plan in which students use dialogic tools to make
meaning out of the themes within Brown Girl Dreaming. This text provides lots of room for
students to pick themes to dissect through discussions and debates thus delivering a lot more
insight into finding textual evidence. These discussions will show that although writing is a very
important factor to English Language Arts, its just as important for student to learn how to express
themselves orally and effectively. The oral presentations will be stepping stones into larger projects
such as essays and multimedia projects, where the students will be able to explore many other
realms of the text besides theme/characterization/central ideas.

Thank you for your time,

Khadija Houston
ELA 9 Instructor
Sprinkle High School
Houstonk9@sprinkle.edu