The creation of culturally relevant English language arts curriculum to promote identity resolution among high school English Language Learners

Abstract

There currently is a lack of curriculum that addresses identity development of adolescent English Language Learners (ELLs) in New York State (NYS) Common Core Modules, an important provider of curriculum for New York high schools. The purpose of this curriculum project was to create a curriculum that promotes the identity development of adolescent ELLs while providing culturally relevant lessons. The goal of these units is for the students to create multimodal identity texts in the form of an autobiography. Identity development is the major crisis of adolescents (Erikson, 1960/1999; Erikson, 1982), and as individuals with diverse factors contributing to their identities (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012; Phinney, 2008), ELLs have additional challenges to address during this critical period. This project draws upon Funds of Knowledge (González, Moll, Tenery, Rivera, Rendon, Gonzales & Amanti, 1995), and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2009) to create a curriculum for a multilingual 10th grade stand-alone ENL classroom. The curriculum is called "Narrating Our Stories with Identity Texts". [from abstract]