“You see, Mr. Asagai, I am looking for my identity!”

Last year, after reading A Raisin in the Sun, my students chose a social issue from the play (e.g. segregation, expectations based on gender, dream jobs vs. real jobs), thought about how the issue applied to their own lives, interviewed people in their communities, and created podcasts in which they analyzed the interviews. It was an OK project—especially given that it was new and there were a billion tech problems with GarageBand—but I found that some students wanted to generalize the experiences of their interviewees to represent an entire group. In one particularly problematic example, three white students wanted to write about de facto racial segregation in New York neighborhoods. When I suggested they examine their own predominantly white neighborhoods, they resisted.

I’ve been thinking ever since about how I can design a project that will get students to connect themselves—their own identities, their own conflicts—to the play. I keep returning to what Lorraine Hansberry said in To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, in response to drama critics arguing over whether it was a play about a black family or a family: “I hadn’t noticed the contradiction because I’d always been under the impression that Negroes are people” (128). It is a universal play, in that all of us have families and all of us have a race. It is not a universal play, in that we come from a diverse array of families and races, and our experiences of family and race differ. It’s both/and. And I want my students to get that their own experiences are like that too: both universal and highly context-specific.

So this year, instead of having them find social issues the play raises, I’d like to have students track conflicts in A Raisin in the Sun. That should be easy. There’s not one relationship in the play that isn’t riddled with conflict, and many basic relationship types are represented: mother/son, mother/daughter, husband/wife, brother/sister, mother-in-law/daughter-in-law, sister-in-law/sister-in-law, boyfriend/girlfriend, father/son, neighbor/neighbor. Each character is also in conflict with himself or herself: Mama over how to spend the money; Walter over whether to occupy the new house; Beneatha over which boyfriend she likes more; Ruth over whether to keep her baby.

I think it’ll be easier for students to relate to conflicts in the play than to see how a “social issue” pertains to them. Even calling it a “social issue” makes it about “society” and not them in particular. But being a brother or sister, son or daughter, grandchild, friend, student, or work partner is something all of them can consider on a personal level. They might, for example, relate to Travis asking his mother for 50 cents, her saying no, and his feeling disappointed. (They might also relate to the fact that Travis’s father then gives him the 50 cents, much to his mother’s chagrin.) Or they might relate to Beneatha and her family having different ideas about how a she should spend her time. Or, they might relate to Walter’s entrusting his money with his “friend” and losing it all. After reading the play and examining some of these conflicts, students will choose one they can relate to and examine how that conflict plays out in their own lives.

But in A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry goes further, making identities and roles central to the conflicts. Identity: Walter is working-class, black, male. Role: He is a father, brother, son, and husband. The conflicts Walter confronts—most notably, whether to take Lindner’s offer and restore the family’s financial security that he destroyed, or maintain his family’s dignity by moving into the new house and facing the racist neighbors—are inextricably bound up in his roles (father, husband, brother, son) and identities (black, male, working-class, Christian). Beneatha, Ruth, Mama, and Travis also find themselves in various conflicts that either flow from their roles and identities, or handle their conflicts in light of those roles and identities, or both.

Are seventh graders, many of whom haven’t quite made the leap to abstract thinking, and many of whom are beginning to question identities and try on new roles, ready to examine how race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or ethnicity plays into their own conflicts? It might be too easy for a 13-year-old to oversimplify causation (“It’s all because…”) or resist the concept (“It has nothing to do with…”). Still, I want to teach to the kids who are ready to think about the conflicts in their lives this way—and push those who aren’t. I’m wondering how I should go about doing that.

Leaning into Writing Discomfort

In her book Designing Writing Assignments, Traci Gardner quotes a line I can’t get out of my head: “Students translate an instructor’s goals into processes they can handle.” The line comes from the Mānoa Writing Program’s study of almost 200 writing students, which further concludes that students use “strategies they devised to deal with earlier writing assignments, and they may try to use these strategies again rather than risk something new.”

I’ve seen this phenomenon plenty of times. Last year, one new project I gave students asked them to make a podcast on a social issue that comes up in A Raisin in the Sun. For the project, each student was to interview someone and then analyze the interview. So if, for example, I interview my dad about his experiences with race, I might compare his experiences to my own, hypothesize why he had certain experiences, or fit his experiences into a larger framework I’ve studied. I was expecting wonderful insights in the podcasts, but instead, I got lots of summaries and descriptions, with very little analysis. If you want to talk Bloom’s Taxonomy, the podcasts were at the very bottom level of thinking, simple reportage.

I was disappointed then, and I sketched up some new lesson plans to give students a clearer sense of what “analysis” means. But now, having the problem framed for me as students doing what they think they can do because they’ve done it before, I realize my task is more complicated than defining “analysis” for students and showing them good models.

Here’s another example of how a learner changes the assignment into something surmountable. My daughter, who is two years old, calls the playground, “peegound.” It’s not an obsession with toilet training that makes her say it this way; it’s that she hasn’t yet figured out how to pronounce Ls, long As, and Rs. She deals with the L and the R in playground by simply omitting them. And the long A sound, she converts to a long E. So what is my daughter doing? She’s translating the implicit assignment, “Say the word playground,” into something she knows she can handle, “Say peegound.” And her coping mechanisms, changing or omitting problem elements, are exactly the methods my students use.

So, how can I make my students see that, as Barack Obama and César Chávez before him put it, YES THEY CAN do analysis? How do I show them they don’t have to pretend the instruction, “analyze,” isn’t there or hope their well-integrated quotations will satisfy me? Giving mini-lessons defining analysis wasn’t sufficient, nor was stating my expectations in clear and precise language. What will I do differently when I assign the podcast this year?

Not only do I need to share more models of analysis, I have to devote more class time to letting students discover what makes the good ones good. I didn’t have student models last year because it was a brand new assignment, and even this year I don’t have many student models because last years’ weren’t all that good. I’ll have to look on NPR and other radio sites for segments that analyze.

(Incidentally, I’ve been looking at The Norton Sampler as a source of good essays. It’s meant for college student writers, but the way the analogy frames techniques might help, and there’s a good companion website with links to more essays. I always say that students don’t write good essays because essays aren’t part of their reading repertoire. Time to change that. And, if reading good analytical essays translates into writing better analytical essays, maybe it’ll also translate into writing better analytical podcasts.)

Also, the purpose and audience of the podcast needs to be clearer. Why should they take a risk on writing if their only goal is to please the teacher? Why should they try something hard that they might do badly if they can do something easier and more familiar and still get an OK grade? If they’re writing their podcasts for a more authentic reason—say, to prove to their parents how much (or how little) has changed between the early years of the Civil Rights Movement and the early years of the Obama presidency—perhaps they’ll have more incentive to analyze the problem. If they’re going to bother with higher levels of thinking like comparing, categorizing, and theorizing, they need to know who they’re trying to convince and why. Perhaps I can get the podcasts published on the school website. What other audiences might motivate them?