Biography and autobiography
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Alphabiography Project: Totally You
To engage adolescent learners, teachers must create classroom environments that are stimulating, varied, and most importantly, that connect to students' daily lives. The importance of these connections is reiterated in the NCTE Guideline on Adolescent Literacy, which states: "All students need to go beyond the study of discrete skills and strategies to understand how those skills and strategies are integrated with life experiences. Langer, et al. found that literacy programs that successfully teach at-risk students emphasize connections between students' lives, prior knowledge, and texts, and emphasize student conversations to make those connections." This lesson plan invites students to write about what they know-themselves and their lives. In this way, the lesson focuses on the one subject that is most likely to generate successful student engagement and learning.
Further Reading
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Alpha biography
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Alphabiography
An alphabiography is an autobiography, often set as an English studies project for high school or college students, consisting of a set of twenty-six short stories or chapters about the writer's life.[1] Each story or chapter has a title starting with a different letter of the alphabet, for example: "Apple growing", "Baseball", "Cynthia" etc. At the end a summation is undertaken.
Examples
The book Totally Joe by James Howe is about Joe Bunch, who is given an assignment to write his alphabiography – although he thinks it will be boring, it turns out to be the gateway for him to learn much about his own identity as a gay young adult.[2]
ReadWriteThink.org, a website sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association, includes a lesson plan for an alphabiography project.[3]