Sonia Lau
Part I: Selection of Text
Title: Young, Proud, Sung-Jee
Author: Joyce Y. Lee and Emily Ku
Synopsis:
This book is about bringing awareness to the Corona-Virus myths, and how the media has depicted the fault of COVID-19 starting due to the fact that people from China “leaked it from the lab”. Due to the uprising of Anti-Asian hate because of the virus, students faced a lot of hard issues and hardships towards people. Lee and Ku’s book directly tackles how to speak about racism and the COVID-19 virus as some young students were made to feel that it was “their fault”.
Part II: Memo
In order to use this text to teach a class in a K-12 classroom, I would teach them first of the facts of COVID-19 and ask them what they remember about it and what their perception of it is. Another key that I would be teaching is their heritage and where they come from as people, because of the bad perceptions that people seem to have that “all Asian and Asian American people are one big group” however Asian or Asian Americans we all have different places we come from and different heritage. In my personal experience, I have had students assume or just are unaware of what languages people speak and make assumptions from there. I would use the text to explain that not all people come from the same place and that it is rude to assume so. Some students aren’t aware and haven’t heard of all languages and places so I would use the text where it features Sung-Jee, a Korean girl as a starter to explain about other cultures and places. My main objective of my lesson is for this class to comprehend that there is a diverse world and understand what racism is, and be able to critique and comprehend what was wrong with some of the sayings in the book. As a teacher using this book, according to Raven Jones Stanbrough and Dr. Muhammad one key of teaching with Critical Literacy one key that will be taught in this class is Identity Development. Identity development is key in ensuring that students have a good understanding and awareness of themselves as oftentimes we don’t get enough opportunities to talk and explain to the students about their heritage and who they are and often there is a big lack of representation in both media and teaching material. As Raven Jones Stanborough expresses how important it is to “Students deserve to be advocated for and respected” I agree with that statement and will continue to lead my teaching with that.