- This activity encourages open and comfortable discussion of differences among students and helps students connect to significant historical events that happened prior to their lifetimes.
| Instructor Prep. Time | Student In-Class Time | Student Out-of-Class Time |
| Less than 30 minutes | 75 minutes | 30-45 minutes |
None
Step-by-Step Procedure:
- Prior to the class meetings, have students read Merry Go Round, Theme for English B and Militant, all poems by Langston Hughes, and complete the workshop, The Speaker and the Poem.
- During class, students meet in small groups and share their created titles to the untitled poems. Each group reports out on their sense of the speaker and the specific words in the poem that helped create that portrait.
- The instructor then tells the students the actual titles of the poems: Poem A, Merry Go Round subtitled, Colored Child at a Carnival and Poem B, Militant and asks the students in the groups to rethink their answers to exercise 3, question 4 in the workshop -- the order in which the poems were written and published.
- After students suggest a new timeline, the instructor tells them that the poems were published in this order: Merry Go Round (1920s); Theme for English B (1950s); Militant (1960s) and asks students if they can see a connection to the progression of speaker and statement and the development of the Civil Rights movement. Students should see that the poems begin with a child who accepts segregation, moves to a college student who questions what it means to be a "colored" American, and then to a laborer who has suffered injustice to the point of resorting to violence in response. Some students may see the connections between The Militant and the Black Panthers ("my fist is raised").
- The instructor then asks students to share in their small groups their responses to exercise 3, questions 5, 6 and 7 -- their own experiences with prejudice -- in order to put the statements of the poems into both global and personal contexts in regard to oppression and injustice.
- In the time remaining, the instructor distributes "In-Class Workshop: The Speaker and the Poem, a New Identity" and asks students within their groups to create a new speaker within the format of the poem with an identity different from Hughes’ speaker, but facing a similar conflict.
- Students may also complete an individual version of the poem using Hughes’ framework for extra credit.
Suggestions for Use:
- Because Hughes is easy to read and well known, the unit could be used in an English or history class, or any course stressing critical reading skills.
