Materials | Computer with Internet access and projector, copies of handouts (optional), materials for creating tributes to students’ creative heroes (see below).
Overview | Why and how do literature and the arts promote personal connections? What writers’ and artists’ lives and works have spoken to us and helped shape us? In this lesson, students identify and investigate a writer or other artist with whom they feel a strong connection and express their relationship with this person, his or her life and works in writing.
Warm-up | As soon as students are settled in, play them the Favorite Poem Project video of high school student Yina Liang reading and talking about Emily Dickinson’s poem #288 (“I’m Nobody! Who are You?”).
Ask students to talk briefly about Yina and her life. Why might she feel a strong connection to this poem? If the class hasn’t yet read the poem, hand it out or project it, and have students discuss what the poem means and why it might be so meaningful to Yina Liang. How is it that a 21st-century high school student can feel so connected to a poem written in the 19th century?
