Borders & Belonging

This collection is designed to be flexible. You can use all of the resources or choose a selection best suited to your classroom. It includes:

The collection includes:

• Back to School Toolkit to help you build community with your students
• An on-demand webinar featuring authors Malaka Gharib and Randy Ribay discussing borders and belonging in young adult literature
• Two introductory lessons that explore the concept of belonging and the tangible and intangible borders that can shape it
• Videos featuring poet and memoirist Richard Blanco reading his poetry and reflecting on belonging, home, and writing
• A multi-genre text set for grades 7-8 with lesson plans and assessment ideas
• An ELA Unit Planning Guide to help you design a borders and belonging literature unit for a book of your choosing
• Book Club Guide with the resources and tools to launch student-centered book clubs
• Whole-School Read Planning Guide

Coming Soon:

• Text sets for additional grade bands:
  • Grades 9–10: Global Migration
  • Grades 11–12: Reimagining Home
• Unit Guides for specific works of literature

To orient yourself to the collection’s themes and essential questions, we recommend that you start by watching one or more of these videos:

• Richard Blanco: Navigating the Borders of Belonging (07:18)
  In this short video, poet and memoirist Richard Blanco considers the ways in which aspects of his identity have shaped his sense of who he is and where he belongs throughout his life.
• Richard Blanco: Finding Belonging in Others (02:23)
  Richard Blanco explores how storytelling and poetry can cultivate empathy and foster connection between individuals and groups, even when the particulars of their lives may seem different. 
• Richard Blanco: Searching for Home (04:45)
  Richard Blanco reflects on his quest for home and the role of storytelling, writing, and memory in his lifelong journey to answer the question, “Where am I from?” 
• Exploring Borders and Belonging in Young Adult Literature with Malaka Gharib and Randy Ribay (1 hour)
  In this recorded webinar, young adult authors Malaka Gharib and Randy Ribay discuss the complexity of belonging, and the tangible and intangible borders that can shape it.

This collection includes two introductory lessons that develop students’ conceptual understanding of the tangible and intangible borders that shape our sense of belonging in the world. We encourage you to teach both introductory lessons before engaging students with other resources in the collection. 

These lessons can be used in grades 7-12; the materials are adaptable and modified versions of the readings are provided.

• Introductory Lesson 1: What is Belonging? introduces students to the concept of belonging and the many factors that can shape one’s sense of belonging in the world. 
• Introductory Lesson 2: How Do Borders Shape Belonging? builds on the first lesson, supporting students to expand their understanding of borders and consider the ways in which borders can impact how individuals and groups experience belonging.

After building schema for the concepts of borders and belonging in the introductory lessons, students will be ready to engage in a thematic unit. 

You can teach the multimodal text set From Fitting in to Belonging, develop and teach a unit on a book of your choice with the ELA Unit Planning Guide, or combine the two for a longer unit.