Schools looking to build genuine cross-curricular connections between their English and history departments often find "Black Like Me" to be an ideal shared text, since it functions equally well as a piece of literature demonstrating sophisticated narrative and rhetorical technique and as a primary historical source documenting specific, dateable conditions during a well-defined historical period. Designing a genuinely cross-curricular assignment, rather than simply having two departments teach the same book independently in parallel, requires deliberate coordination around which skills each department will emphasize and how the two strands of instruction will ultimately connect in a shared or complementary final assessment. This kind of coordination takes real planning time upfront but produces a noticeably richer learning experience than either department teaching the text in isolation.

A well-designed cross-curricular assignment might have the English department focus on close reading skills, rhetorical analysis, and narrative technique during the first weeks of a shared unit, while the history department simultaneously provides historical context, relevant primary source documents, and background on the specific legal and social conditions of the Jim Crow South during the same period Griffin documents. Students then bring both sets of skills together in a single culminating essay that requires both literary analysis and historical contextualization, demonstrating that they can move fluidly between reading a text closely for its craft and reading it as evidence within a specific historical moment. This dual demand mirrors the kind of interdisciplinary thinking students will increasingly need in college coursework and in careers that require synthesizing information across different analytical frameworks.

Coordinating the timeline between the two departments matters enormously for this kind of assignment to work well, since students need the historical context from the history classroom to be available before or alongside the literary analysis happening in English class, not delivered after the English unit has already concluded. Departments planning this kind of shared unit should build a shared calendar identifying exactly which chapters or sections of the memoir align with which specific historical background lessons, ensuring students always have the context they need available at the moment they are analyzing the corresponding textual material. This kind of careful sequencing is often the single biggest factor determining whether a cross-curricular unit produces genuinely integrated student thinking or simply two disconnected units that happen to share a text.

Designing a Culminating Assessment That Requires Both Skill Sets

The culminating assessment for a cross-curricular unit like this should explicitly require students to draw on both the literary and historical strands of instruction, rather than allowing students to satisfy the assignment using only one department's skill set while ignoring the other. A well-designed prompt might ask students to analyze a specific rhetorical choice Griffin makes in a chosen passage, and then to explain how a specific piece of historical context, drawn from material covered in the history classroom, illuminates why that particular choice mattered for his intended audience. This structure genuinely requires both strands of the unit, since a student who has only engaged with the literary analysis portion will be unable to complete the historical contextualization half of the prompt, and vice versa.

• Analyze a specific rhetorical choice in a chosen passage and explain its significance for Griffin's audience
• Connect that choice to specific historical context covered in the shared unit's history component
• Evaluate how well the memoir functions as both literature and as historical primary source evidence
• Compare Griffin's account to at least one other primary source document from the same historical period
• Argue what the pairing of literary and historical analysis reveals that either approach alone would miss

Coordinating Grading Between Two Departments

Grading a cross-curricular essay fairly requires a shared rubric developed jointly by both departments before the assignment begins, with clearly weighted sections addressing the literary analysis component and the historical contextualization component separately, so that a student's grade reflects genuine strength across both dimensions rather than compensating strength in one area for weakness in the other. Departments should decide in advance whether both teachers will grade every essay collaboratively, whether they will split the class and grade different students independently, or whether one teacher will lead grading with input from the other, since each approach has different implications for workload and for grading consistency across the full group of students. Whichever structure is chosen, both departments should review a small sample of graded essays together to confirm shared understanding of what strong work looks like in both dimensions.

This kind of collaborative grading also creates a valuable opportunity for both departments to learn from each other's disciplinary standards and expectations, which can improve instruction even outside this specific shared unit. English teachers often gain a sharper sense of what counts as rigorous historical contextualization, while history teachers often gain a deeper appreciation for the kind of close textual analysis literary study requires, and both of these cross-disciplinary insights tend to strengthen each department's independent instruction over time. Schools that invest in this kind of genuine collaboration, rather than simply having two departments coincidentally assign the same book, tend to see this benefit extend well beyond the single shared unit.

Sustaining the Unit as a Long-Term Departmental Resource

Once a cross-curricular unit like this is built and refined, it becomes a genuinely valuable long-term resource, but sustaining it requires ongoing communication between the two departments, particularly as teaching staff change over time and new teachers in either department need to be brought up to speed on the coordination the unit requires. Documenting the shared calendar, the joint rubric, and specific examples of strong culminating essays in a format accessible to both departments protects the unit's institutional knowledge from being lost when a key teacher who helped design it moves on or changes roles. This kind of documentation investment ensures the significant planning effort that goes into building a genuinely integrated cross-curricular unit continues paying dividends for future cohorts of students well beyond its first year.

Schools considering this kind of cross-curricular investment should also plan for how they will evaluate whether the unit is achieving its intended goals over time, whether through student surveys about how well they felt the two strands of instruction connected, or through analysis of whether culminating essay scores show genuine integration of both literary and historical skills rather than students defaulting heavily toward whichever discipline they find more comfortable. This kind of ongoing evaluation helps both departments refine the unit's coordination year over year, ensuring that the genuinely ambitious goal of true interdisciplinary thinking continues to be met rather than gradually drifting back toward two separate units loosely connected by a shared text.