Approved 4/24/02

READING LIFE HISTORIES

Level I

RATIONALE:  Telling one’s life story is often a way to explain one’s present situation or to reflect on one’s values, loyalties, and identities.  People who write or tell their own stories also place themselves in history by describing in varying degrees the times in which they lived.  They are doing more than telling stories; they are acting as historians.  This is also true in many works of fiction in which writers imaginatively create characters, tell their stories, and place them in history.

By reading autobiographies, biographies, and oral histories, as well as certain novels and short stories, students can view the past through the lives of individuals.  These lives may differ in many respects from those of the reader, but the life stories will also reveal aspects of the human experience familiar to readers.  As a result, reading the literature of life stories can offer students insights into their own lives and their own place in history.

When these life stories report on diverse experiences and reflect different values and cultural identities, the reader is also offered ways of understanding how various people were affected differently by history, how they coped with various difficulties and made significant choices, and how they participated in the historical events of their time.Reading life stories should raise questions in the student’s mind about history, culture, and society that can then be explored in more advanced competencies.

COMPETENCY:  Can read life histories closely, report on how individual lives were shaped by conscious choices and by historical events, and discuss the content and style of a particular life history.

CRITERIA:

1.              Read published life histories closely and carefully.

2.              Discuss how an author conveys a sense of the historical circumstances that impact an individual in one of the life histories chosen for Criterion 1.

3.              Using at least two of the life histories chosen for Criterion 1, compare how common life experiences, including the choices individuals make, are described in different accounts.

4.              Report on how specific historical events and circumstances exert different or similar effects on the lives of individuals whose experiences are described in the same life history or in different life histories.

5.              Explain how the content and the style of one life history affected you.

STANDARDS:

1.      For Criterion 1:

a.               You should select at least three life histories selected with the approval of the evaluator.

b.              Read the life histories should be at a level of comprehension that allows you to report accurately on important developments in the individual’s life, including personal experiences and historical events.

c.               Summarize at least one life history according to guidelines presented by the evaluator.   Summaries may be oral, or written as outlines or as prose. Attention should be given to the actions, events, and circumstances that are most important in an individual’s life.  There should be an organizing principle to the summaries (chronology, causality, significance, etc.).

2.      For Criterion 2, select particular passages from a story and use them as the basis for an essay that explains how the author represents a sense of the historical circumstances.

3.      In addressing Criterion 3, write an essay that compares how common life experiences and personal choices are presented in two or three different texts, including experiences and choices involving family, community, and the larger society, as well as personal, cultural, ethical, and political identity.

4.      In addressing Criterion 4, compare the effects of one historical event or circumstance on two or three different lives.

5.      For Criterion 5, explain how one work made a particular impact on you, both in terms of the substance of the story and in terms of how it was told—the character or style of the story.  Some of the elements of style that you might consider are:  first- or third-person narrative, reminiscent or in the present, closely observed or more distanced, dramatic or modulated, colloquial or standard language, chronological sequence or non-linear time sequence, story only or story with commentary, degree of focus on consciousness (thoughts and feelings) rather than just events and actions, degree of focus on actions and consciousness of persons other than central individual, attention to historical context.

EXAMPLES OF DEMOSTRATION:

1.      Prior Learning:  A student who has been reading fiction and autobiography discusses that reading with an evaluator and selects pre-read texts to use as a basis for demonstrating this competency.

2.      Independent Learning:  A student reads slave narratives by Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Booker T. Washington and writes about how these life histories are similar and different in terms of language and story-telling style and how they are illuminated by the insights of W.E.B. DuBois in Souls of Black Folk.

3.      Course:  A student completes a CPCS course addressing the competency.

4.      Field Project: A group of students works with an evaluator to select a list of different life histories to read, and then decides on three books all will read and discuss with a view toward starting a reading group in a community, or residential or workplace setting.  These students will then ask others in a given setting to read these three titles and arrange to lead three discussions with the readers.  They will keep logs of the discussions to present to the evaluator.  In addition, each student individually submits summaries and papers required to demonstrate the competency.