About This Lesson
Teach students about the adjustments faced by immigrants by reading Edwidge Danticat’s Behind the Mountains. This gripping novel chronicles the life of a young girl in Haiti who is forced to flee political violence and reunite with her father in the U.S. The unit plan includes activities to: keep a dialectical journal, decipher the meaning of figurative language in Haitian proverbs, apply the “push-pull” factors of immigration, understand how a duality of cultures and stages of adaptation function in the lives of immigrants, as well as write an argumentative essay.
