Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”: Engaging with the Text in Multiple Modalities

NOTE: This doc is entirely faculty-facing. Please follow the links below for the student-facing assignments.

Rationale 

This is a staged assignment that emphasizes reading-to-write. The related high-stakes assignment is an argumentative essay responding to Martin Luther King Jr.’s text “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (an abridged version). Since King’s “Letter” is itself a model of effective argumentation, students will analyze the rhetorical moves in the text in addition to responding with their own arguments. The primary goal of this assignment is to foster more robust inquiry into the assigned text by 1) enriching students’ understanding of its historical contexts and 2) promoting interactive student commentary on the text. 

Stage 1: Introduction to text

Keeping in mind that students, particularly recent immigrants, may be unfamiliar with Martin Luther King Jr. in particular or the Civil Rights Movement in general, students begin by learning about the historical context of the reading assignment. These contextualizing materials are in a range of modalities, to help make the coursework more accessible and to support multilingual students. 

1. King reading “Letter” 

The assigned text read by its author. This resource helps bring the text to life, since students can hear King’s own sonorous voice, and the recording is accompanied by a slideshow of photos of King. It can also help make the text more accessible because students can enable captions in multiple languages, and also hear where the emphasis should fall in the sentences in the text.

2. Context about “Letter” from History.com

This user-friendly website has a brief overview of the historical context of this specific text, with links to additional resources to invite students to explore further.

Stage 2: Reading and individual annotations

1. Individual annotation assignment

To support active reading and critical thinking, this assignment asks students to annotate the text individually and then submit their annotations for a grade.

2. Quick video review about annotation

We’ll discuss annotation strategies in class, but this video can serve as a quick review.

Stage 3: Social annotations

1. Social annotations assignment

Building on the individual annotations assignment, this assignment invites students to share their inquiry and critical responses to the text with their classmates on a shared Google doc. Inspired by Tara Coleman’s presentations about using Perusall in her classes, I’m actually hoping to use that platform for this assignment instead of Google docs, but I’m still in the process of getting comfortable with Perusall.

Stage 4: High-stakes assignment

1. Essay assignment

My hope is that the individual and collaborative inquiry the students have done in the earlier stages of this unit will be reflected in the essay they compose for this high-stakes assignment. I’m still in the process of revising the structure of the essay assignment so that it elicits the most analysis and synthesis.