AP Unit 4: Short Fiction II (Women in World Lit)
This unit creates opportunities for students to progress as readers of short fiction. Students not only identify literary elements like character, setting, structure, and language in isolation as they may have earlier in the school year, but also begin to consider how they work together, for instance by exploring the relationship between character and setting. The students will work on making literary claims that can be supported by a line of reasoning in a body paragraph, which is assessed through a short answer assessment at the end of the unit.
In this unit, the students will get to read short stories from female writers from around the world:
- “Children of the Sea” by Edwidge Danticat
- “My Mother the Crazy African” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid
- “Leng Lui is for Pretty Lady” by Elaine Chieuw
- Some Are Born to Sweet Delight” by Nadine Gordimer
Teaching Resources (PDF)
Teaching Resources (Word)
A Note about the Resources
The lessons were designed around the Unit 4 skills and essential knowledge as defined in the AP Literature and Composition Course and Exam Description. However, this unit could certainly be taught outside of the AP context as well.
Presentation Slides
The presentation slides are intended to be used to facilitate the lessons.
Activity Descriptions and Corresponding Essential Knowledge
I have also included a document describing, briefly, how each activity was conducted and outlining which AP Essential Knowledge correlates with each lesson. There are some notes about my personal experience with each lesson as well.
Assessment
This unit was assessed through a short answer test and assessed on a rubric designed using AP Unit 4 Skills. Student responses were evaluated based on the extent to which they did or did not demonstrate these skills. Qualitative feedback was given to students for the Skills that corresponded with their two questions as well as the Literary Argumentation Skills.
More Authors/Reading from Around the Globe
A few of these stories were found in One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories. I strongly recommend this collection, not just for this unit.
Image by Dariusz Sankowski from Pixabay
I really like what you have done here! This gives me so many ideas of how to expand the units and suggested activities!
**In the PDF versions, BOTH “Girl” paragraphs are scrambled.
This is really fabulous. Thank you, Jennifer for sharing these. I am looking forward to subscribing for the resources soon.
Congratulations. This new project is really interesting and it is very user-friendly. Definitely thinking of getting a subscription, and hope it will become a collaborative project soon!
I love the assessment menu. My question is how much of skills focus to you aim to realistically include in a unit in order for students to choose between, say, a review and a comparative essay. I’d be very interested to know what the approach is with this.
Thanks in advance. Looking forward to seeing more of all this.
Hi Faye! Thank you so much for the positive feedback! And Great question! When I have offered the assessment menu, students have completed several of these assessment tasks already in different units in the course, so they are familiar with them. Our 9 and 10 programs also incorporate these assessment tasks into their curriculums (pastiches, comparative essays, etc.), so there has been exposure there as well. We are always working with the core skills of developing an interpretation/drawing conclusions about a work and appreciating and evaluating how the structure and language of the work support those ideas – so that is the same across the assessments tasks (even though the scope of that differs with commentary being more micro and an essay being more macro). For the comparative essay, I flag this option as the challenge option when the assessment menu is implemented earlier in the course. When students have chosen this, I have run a mini-workshop with those students to more explicitly go over things to consider for a comparative essay (and mini-workshops could be a good approach once you see what the assessment interests are – students tend not to choose a few to pursue as a cohort which makes this manageable). All students get an opportunity for one-on-one check-ins, and this helps as well. I am in the middle of writing a post about the assessment menu, so I will try to address this question about skill prep in more depth there as well!