Our rationale for choosing a Unit on coming of age is based around the fact that our students are

at a pivotal point in their lives. In eleventh grade, students undergo a change where they begin to truly realize who they are and form their personal identity. We felt that this unit would be helpful for our students to realize their own aspirations while they analyze the style and storytelling of coming of age stories as well as creating their own. This bi-thematic approach allows us to help our students on a personal level as well as develop their knowledge of other cultures. Our Conceptual Literature Unit will be based on connecting different forms of Literature written by or about youth of diverse cultures within the US--with a focus on coming of age stories: themes of ceremonial practices, losing innocence, gaining responsibilities, finding ones identity as an adult, etc. As we began to plan the unit we realized that we could take our ideas in many directions simply because of the immense diversity of the United States. We decided to focus on arranged marriages in Eastern religions, Americanization, discovering ones identity, and other cultural events, all through a lens focusing on growing up with these cultural traditions in the context of American culture. We will introduce the topic to the class and spend a few days each week focusing on a short story or an excerpt from a novel with elements of coming of age in different cultures. For this unit, we are planning on incorporating different mediums of literature. We are using short stories, excerpts from a novel, applicable podcasts, and a movie relating to the unit theme. We will begin the unit with short excerpts from The Truth About Stories, a Native American collection that focuses on telling small stories rather than trying to incorporate society as a whole. This is perhaps the most important aspect of our unit due to its combination of practical applications for literature and writing. It provides a basis for the rest of the unit. The project on which students will work throughout the unit will be a Prezi website, containing all the other pieces of student work completed throughout the unit. We decided to include the Prezi as a way to bring technology even further into the unit as we value the importance of technology in this changing global society. We also believe that writing is incredibly important and its quality is slowly decreasing among students. By combining writing projects and technological aspects, we draw together themes and literary methods. Our writing portion of the unit is made up of a personal coming of age short story and a written response to the movie, Arranged. We bring this writing into technology by recording the students reading their own coming of age stories, adding a short focus on oral tradition. We believe this unit will help our students realize the importance of oral tradition and its impact on their creation of an identity. We hope that, at the end of this unit, our students will be able to express and celebrate their cultural identity.