As a reflection of my experience as a graduate student, I present a teaching course entitled "Overcoming Obstacles and Locating Identity in 20th Century American Literature," which focuses on short stories and poetry and is designed for either high school or undergraduate survey courses. I carefully chose texts that are representative of a wide variety of authors and genres and took my own experiences as both a student and graduate teaching assistant into consideration.

I have developed the outline of a unit essay assignment to go along with these texts; depending on the course number or the unit is being used in, the assignment can be tweaked to become more complex by requiring the use of more than one text. For a high school or introductory level course, this basic outline of an essay assignment requires the students to collect evidence and make a claim about how a text on the syllabus utilizes the issues at hand, overcoming trauma and developing or locating an identity.

The supporting unit activities were created with a few specific ideas in mind. The creative writing assignment is to get the students writing and thinking about literature in a non-threatening way by allowing them to creating their own ending to Ernest Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." The second piece of the scaffold asks the students to think critically about Langston Hughes' "Theme for English B" by writing their own page of "truths." The third and fourth assignments are a bit more complex and require the students to think about multiple issues across a text. I have drawn an unusual combination of authors together, Sylvia Plath and John Updike, and the students are asked to write about family situations and make connections between two very difficult texts. The culminating short assignment focuses on Nikki Giovanni's "Love Is" and helps the students find a way into the text by asking them to identify the voices within the poem. Through these assignments, the students will first become comfortable with reading and writing and then they will use their skills to develop more thoughtful and carefully formed opinions as they write, which will help them develop their ideas for the unit essay.