Mawuena Dabla-Egui, French, Harding University High School
Synopsis
“Grève” is French for strike. Grève is a curriculum focusing on a memoir that I wrote with the same title. My memoir Grève is about my life when my family and I were forced to flee Togo our country, to seek refuge in our neighboring country Benin, because the whole country was on a nationwide strike. My memoir will serve as an example for students to write their own memoir. We will be able to have a genre study in French. Students will be studying my memoir first, the vocabulary, and the grammar tenses that come with it. The main goal will be to be able to study the structures of a memoir in order to write theirs. Students will write three different drafts, there will be some peer reviews and feedback activities. We will learn the traits of a memoir, and then unpack it in my own memoir. It is known that people tend to have a natural inclination to talk about their lives, so students will be able to use my memoir, the traits of a memoir to incite this natural inclination in them. Students will have the option to read other memoirs as well and write a unique memoir, which will be about a personal story that for them was a life-changing event. In addition, my memoir was a way for me to communicate my identity. Usually students go through a lot (bullying, low self-esteem, identity crisis, immigration issues, gender and racial biases etc.), and sometimes even the significant adults in their lives do not know about them and it is hard for them to express it. I am hoping that this lesson on memoir will help them to express themselves when they will be communicating their identities. Even though their memoirs could be happy or sad, it will be an episode, which made a significant change in their lives. This unit will take approximately two weeks.
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