Imagining the Future:
A Creative Writing Mini-Project
Essential Questions
What will this place look like in the future?
How can imagining the future help us understand the present?
How can imagining the future help us understand the present?
Project HandoutFor a PDF version with clickable links, click here.
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Anchor TextBinti: The Complete Trilogy - Nnedi Okorafor
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Project Goals
Social-Emotional Learning
- Students will identify cultures in their life and explore how those cultures help them create meaning.
- Students will be able to articulate the importance of futuristic visions that include our own diverse cultures.
Culturally Responsive Pedagogy
- Students will understand that culture is, in the words of one student, "the glue that binds us together." They will understand that culture includes a wide variety of shared social institutions and norms including arts, social institutions, knowledge, achievement, customs, values, symbols, foods, and more.
- Students will understand that culture isn't stagnant—it's always changing—and that members of any culture are constantly helping to dictate how that change happens.
Critical Pedagogy
- Students will be able to articulate how defining and designing an inclusive future can give purpose and vision to action today.
- Students will be able to critique literary futures that center white and patriarchal cultures.
- Students will be able to both critique and appreciate canonical and/or "mainstream" literary futures that are found in our national culture.
Academic Content
- Students will understand Afrofuturism and its context—both historically and contemporarily—in the United States. Students will be able to discuss the differences between Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism (a term coined by Binti author Nnedi Okorafor in 2019).
- Students will be able to utilize close reading skills when analyzing a text.
- Students will be able to analyze a text using a variety of literary criticism "lenses" including the Gender/Feminist lens, the Biographical/Historical lens, the Psychoanalytical/Psychological lens, and the Race/Ethnicity lens.
- Students will be able to edit short stories for grammar, punctuation, dialogue formatting, etc.
For a calendar of our weekly goals please click here.