Personal and Cultural Identity

ASSIGNMENT 3.8: PROJECT

 Learning Target(s):

  • Recognize and identify the role of personal, social, and cultural contexts, values, and perspectives in texts
  • Recognize and understand how language constructs personal, social, and cultural identities
  • Construct meaningful personal connections between self, text, and world
  • Access information for diverse purposes and from a variety of sources and evaluate its relevance
  • Think critically, creatively, and reflectively to explore ideas with, between, and beyond texts


ESSENTIAL QUESTION:  How do our experiences shape our identities?

Task:

For this final project, you will explore how our experiences shape our identities - personal, social, and cultural.  How does one's identity construct meaningful and personal connections with self, text, and the world?  You will use the provided resources to analyze texts and communicate your understanding of what these resources have to say about how our experiences define us.  You will also analyze your own resource selections and communicate your personal connections with self, text, and the world.  Your research and final product will be done under your specific course umbrella, as detailed in the course specific handout to follow.  In other words, students who are enrolled in either Composition, Creative Writing, Literature Studies, New Media, or Spoken Language will each have a different approach to this topic. 

All students will be required to:

  • Use the skills that you have developed in this course.

  • Research the given topic so that you become an expert on it.

  • Keep an MLA-style works cited list that will be turned in with your final product.

  • Develop an descriptive product that creates a clear image of the main idea.



The Topic:

The following resources will help you gain a basic understanding of how authors communicate meaning and share how their experiences have come to define their identity and connection to others, to text/the world, and to themselves. 

 In order to deepen your understanding so that you are able to effectively complete this project, you are required to conduct your own research as well, exploring avenues of the topic that are most relevant to your course.  

Resource #1:  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - "The Danger of a Single Story". 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Enugu, Nigeria is a Nigerian novelist, writer of short stories, and nonfiction. Adichie, who was born in the city of Enugu in Nigeria, grew up as the fifth of six children in an Igbo family in the university town of Nsukka in Enugu State. "The Danger of a Single Story" talks about how "our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding."

Resource #2:  Katherena Vermette - "Heart". 

Katherena Vermette knows her beloved neighbourhood in Winnipeg has a reputation for violence and racism, and the Governor General Award-winning Métis poet is using the power of words to change that.