From Me to We
Subtitle
Using Narrative Nonfiction to Broaden Student Perspectives
With this practical book, you’ll learn effective ways to engage students in reading and writing by teaching them narrative nonfiction. By engaging adolescents in narrative, literary, or creative nonfiction, they can cultivate a greater understanding of themselves, the world around them, and what it means to feel empathy for others. This book will guide you to first structure a reading unit around a narrative nonfiction text, and then develop lessons and activities for students to craft their own personal essays. Topics include:
• Engaging your students in the reading of a nonfiction narrative with collaborative chapter notes, empathy check-ins, and a mini-research paper to deepen students’ understanding.
• Helping your students identify meaningful life events, recount their experiences creatively, and construct effective opening and closing lines for their personal essays.
• Encouraging your students to use dialogue, outside research, and a clear plot structure to make their narrative nonfiction more compelling and polished.
The strategies in this book are supplemented by examples of student work and snapshots from the author’s own classroom. The book also includes interviews with narrative nonfiction writers MK Asante and Johanna Bear. The appendices offer additional tips for using narrative nonfiction in English class, text and online resources for teaching narrative nonfiction, and a correlation chart between the activities in this book and the Common Core Standards.
An Eye on Education series book.
Bio
Jason Griffith earned a PhD in English (English education) from Arizona State University in 2018. "From Me to We" was published while he was still a doctoral student.
Praise for this book
True stories are the way we have always communicated — culturally, professionally, and personally — from cave drawings to computers and the Internet. Books, blogs, dialogues and debates all rely on the stories we tell and how effectively we tell them. This is why Jason Griffith’s book is so useful and important: it stresses the necessity of narrative/creative nonfiction and provides teachers and their students with the theory and the craft that will help them use true stories to inform and inspire themselves and others.
Lee Gutkind Editor and Founder, Creative Nonfiction Magazine
'From Me to We' will serve as a guide for teachers and teacher educators who recognize the value of narrative nonfiction but aren’t sure how to incorporate it into their current curriculum. Jason unpacks why and how to invite narrative nonfiction reading and writing into English language arts and humanities classrooms in a compelling and friendly manner. All who read this book will realize the exciting possibilities.
Shanetia Clark Associate Professor of Literacy, Salisbury University, Maryland
