For the past four years, I have taught ELA to newcomer students who have recently immigrated to the United States. Selecting a literary text for newcomers at the high school level poses a unique pedagogical challenge: the text’s language must be accessible to beginning English learners, but its content must be intellectually engaging for teenage students. Over the years, my colleagues and I experimented with creative approaches to teaching Romeo and Juliet and YA literature. However, our students—still in the early stages of language acquisition—struggled to independently decode and comprehend the texts. 

This school year, our school’s newcomer history teacher suggested complementing study of civilizations in history class with an ELA unit on the civilizations’ mythologies. Our ELA team soon realized that creation myth texts are a perfect fit for newcomers because they contain simple but rich language and deal with intellectually rigorous themes. For the unit texts, we used a Khan Academy course on origin stories from various cultures, which is accessible online for free and includes eight different myths. My co-teacher, who specializes in literacy support, created two differentiated versions of each creation myth based on students’ English proficiency level. She used free AI tools to adapt texts, such as Magic School to simplify the language and DeepAI to generate images that support comprehension. 

We began the unit with the Abrahamic creation myth because students were familiar with the story of Adam and Eve through Christian or Islamic teachings. Later in the unit, many of our Central American students recognized the Mayan creation myth we read from the Popol Vuh, a text about Mayan mythology and history. Activating students’ prior knowledge of these narratives in their native languages was a valuable tool to aid their understanding of the texts in English. Additional reading comprehension strategies we used were pre-teaching key vocabulary, student use of bilingual dictionaries, and implementation of an annotation guide to help students become more active readers. Annotating required students to recognize cognates, choose words to look up in the dictionary, identify main ideas, ask questions, and make connections between the text and their prior knowledge.

For the core of the unit, which focused on analysis of themes, I applied theories I learned from Bread Loaf’s Literary Criticism course led by Professor Rasmussen. I was inspired by structuralist thinkers who searched for commonalities in myths across cultures. Identifying thematic similarities and differences between myths in various cultures were useful exercises for my students, who as new immigrants, were further strengthening their cross-cultural awareness. They realized civilizations throughout time have been curious about how the earth and universe were created and theorized different responsibilities humans should have within them. Our classes mapped key themes in each myth we read and found the concepts of creation from nothing, power of speaking, human responsibility, curiosity, disobedience, and evolution were present in multiple texts. For one particular activity in the unit, I employed another theory that we studied in Literary Criticism: reader response. Students reflected on the relevance of creation from nothing to their experiences learning a new language and adapting to a new country. The theme of the power of speaking appealed to students; they spoke about how vocalizing our dreams to others can help them become reality. They also debated when disobedience is justified, discussing how adolescents may challenge authority to seek independence, similar to Eve’s pursuit of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. 

In the unit’s culminating assessment, students chose to compare two creation myths that had a common theme using English language sentence frames as scaffolds. Newcomer students have varying English proficiency levels, so some students wrote their compositions almost entirely in English, while others used a translanguaging methodology to mix target vocabulary they have learned in English with their native language. This evidence-based practice supports students’ English language development while also enabling them to leverage their native languages to express more complexity in their writing.

For their final assessments, many students wrote about how the concept of creation from nothing in the Abrahamic creation myth was related to the expansion of energy in the Big Bang. When learning context about the Big Bang, students were surprised to hear that a Catholic priest from Belgium, Georges Lemaître, first proposed the theory. After learning this fact, a few students confided that they felt more open to the idea that scientific and religious beliefs could coexist. Other students chose to write about evolution in the Big Bang theory and the Mayan gods’ trial and error process to achieve the most perfect form of humans. The theme of power of speaking lent itself to comparison in students’ writing about the Mayan and the Abrahamic creation myths, in which creation of the world occurred through divine speech. Adam and Eve and the man and woman in the Efik creation myth from Nigeria display many similarities. In both myths, the female figure’s curiosity is the catalyst for disobeying orders from a god. In their analyses, a few students pointed out the difference between the focus on Eve’s disobedience and punishment in the Abrahamic myth and the description of the woman in the Efik myth as brave and independent. 

When teaching this unit next school year, I would like to include the Iroquois creation myth about a woman who arrives on earth by falling from the sky. I discussed this myth with the BLTN Book Club during a meeting about Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. I shared with the group that I was struck by Kimmerer’s framing of the “Skywoman” as an immigrant who learns to cultivate a strong relationship with her new land. I think this interpretation would resonate with my students and is fruitful for comparing Skywoman with the woman from the Efik myth, who also migrates from the sky to the earth. Another idea that my school colleagues and I brainstormed for next year is to add a creative component to the unit: students will choose to retell one creation story that we have read. In the spirit of the oral traditions that these myths were originally shared in, students will add or change at least three details in their retellings. I look forward to their oral presentations next year. 

Valeriana Dema teaches at Theodore Roosevelt High School in Washington D.C.