All resources in Oregon Language Arts and Literacy

Smithsonian in Your Classroom: Native American Dolls

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Developed in collaboration with the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies, this lesson plan presents the firsthand perspectives of five Native American doll makers from around the United States. Students examine full–color images of dolls from the museum's collection in order to learn more about the diverse cultures, communities, and environments the dolls represent.

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson

Author: Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

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Invisible Man follows its unnamed narrator as he journeys from the rural South to bustling Harlem, experiencing the barriers created by the color line in twentieth-century American life. The novel borrows heavily from jazz and blues forms as its narrator encounters fictionalized versions of major African American leaders like Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey. Alternately comic and tragic, the novel explores the psychological effects of racism across U.S. social institutions, geographies, and social classes. (Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop critical thinking skills by exploring topics in history, literature, and culture through primary sources. Drawing online materials from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States, the sets use letters, photographs, posters, oral histories, video clips, sheet music, and more. Each set includes a topic overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide.)

Material Type: Primary Source

Novels for the End of a World

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Twenty-First-Century Fiction in Spain and Latin America Short Description: Novels for the End of a World is an introduction to the twenty-first century novel as written and published across the Spanish-speaking world. It's also an argument for reading narrative fiction from Spain and Latin America as a single entity. Where once we analyzed literature within narrow national traditions, today’s best-seller lists, literary prize money, and even the tales themselves point to the need for more holistic approaches. So too the themes they explore. Today’s writers and readers inhabit a global world where our sense of space and time shrinks at exponential rates. At the same time so much of daily experience continues to be lived locally and, as always, with often overwhelming affect. Given that, it shouldn´t surprise us to find common threads and themes running across narrative fiction from Madrid to Mexico, from Argentina to Asturias, and yet to find at each stop these themes registered through intensely and intimately local stories. In this way, Novels for the End of a World becomes at once an overview of major trends in narrative across the Spanish-speaking world and a trip through the rich, wide variety of local life. Arising out of this literary adventure is one thread common to all: that beyond the end is a barely distinguishable glimmer of light, a sign of new ways for a new world. Long Description: Novels for the End of a World is an introduction to the twenty-first century novel as written and published across the Spanish-speaking world. It is also an argument for reading narrative fiction from Spain and Latin America as a single entity. Where once we analyzed narrative fiction within narrow national or continental traditions, today’s best-seller lists, literary prize money, and even the fictions themselves point to the need for more holistic approaches. Today Sergio Pitol reads Vila-Matas while Cercas writes of Bolaño reading Cercas. Meanwhile Spanish publishing houses such as Anagrama and even Planeta dole out prize money to increasingly young and unknown Latin American authors. For general readers searching out their latest read on sites like Amazon or Casa del Libro, national distinctions simply don’t exist. To search for Luiselli is to discover Fernández Mallo, while Marías will lead you to Rosero. Where they´re from doesn´t feature and likely doesn´t much matter. While a Bourdeauian description of this newly broadened field of cultural production, or Spanish-language Republic of Letters—to borrow two potentially useful terms—needs to be developed, Novels for the End of a World is a more humble attempt to practice in a limited fashion what it might look like to read novels from across the Spanish-speaking world as a whole. Novels reads one work against another and then another. While it pays plenty of attention to historical context, it gives little heed to local literary traditions. It assumes rather that these works can and should be read as addressing common concerns across a single cultural and linguistic milieux. The monograph´s name is inspired in the title of Mexican author Yuri Herrera´s Signs Preceding the End of the World (2011), a reading of which headlines the study. The guiding thematic of the work is a common anxiety surrounding the notion of an end—of times, of places, of meanings, and even of lives. In Herrera´s novel both traditional Mexican society and traditional Mexico/USA divisions collapse under the weight of so much migration—material and virtual. The divisions give way under the weight of hybrid world and identities so novel that they exceed the very possibilities of the language that would describe them. In some novels the sense of an ending is manifest via readings of economic crisis (Gopeguí´s Reality; Eloy Martínez´s Tango Singer; Aira´s Shantytown). In others the ending is more violent (Rosero´s The Armies; Rey Rosa´s Enchanted Stones; Roncagliolo´s Red April; Pron´s The Spirit of My Father and Zambra´s Ways of Going Home). Still others register a more sinister, because seemingly innocuous, collapse brought on by political and cultural hegemonies (Lalo´s Simone; Guerra´s Everyone Leaves; Santos Mayra´s Any Wednesday I´m Yours). The study concludes with a look at a collection of short stories by a “Spanish” artist writing in Asturian, Xuan Bello, whose intensely local yet equally cosmopolitan work, situated within the illustrative context of contemporary Spanish economic, political, and cultural development, may offer a final “sign at the end,” a way forward when all paths—economic, political, and cultural—appear to have come to naught. Word Count: 109324 ISBN: 9780991504374 (Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)

Material Type: Textbook

Author: Nathan Richardson

Let's Get Literate: All About Information Literacy

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An OER which highlights the importance of information literacy in this day and age of the fourth information revolution and shares some of the tips and tricks accumulated by a distance learner at the University of the Philippines Open University. Outline of the Content: 1. Home 2. What is Information Literacy? 3. Information Literacy and Online Learning 4. Finding High-Quality Information Online 5. Wikipedia for Academics 6. Sharing Your Works Online 7. Recommended Resources 8. About the Author

Material Type: Diagram/Illustration, Module, Reading, Student Guide

Author: Mickey Angel T. Cortez

Miss Indian America

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The Miss Indian America Pageant was launched by Sheridan residents in the 1950's to combat discrimination. In the accompanying lesson plan (found in the Support Materials) students will view the story told through the eyes of Miss Indian America title holders who held a reunion in 2013, serving as grand marshals in the Sheridan, WY Rodeo parade and commemorating a legacy of bridging cultures. LEARNING OBJECTIVES: Students will identify the reason why the town of Sheridan, WY started the Miss Indian America Pageant. Students will define the given vocabulary words.

Material Type: Activity/Lab, Lesson