THE NYCORE CONFERENCE SCHEDULED FOR SATURDAY, MARCH 21 HAS BEEN CANCELLED. We will discuss other possibilities for making up this time.
As we dive into literary analysis, let’s talk favorite texts to teach and read with young people! What are some of your favorite pieces of “literature” (broadly defined) to use in class, and why? How have you engaged with visuals to aid in analysis, if at all, per this week’s reading? What might it mean to take a decolonial approach to literary analysis (reading and writing) in ELA? Finally, please remember to reference the assigned reading AND to reference one outside resource, lesson idea, text, etc. that you have found useful or that engages with this idea. (For this week, this would be the texts you like to teach, for instance.)
I use literary analysis strategies to teach literary elements, figurative language, and literary theory. I really like to incorporate multi-modal texts to achieve these ends. When working with the difference between direct and indirect characterization, I enjoy using the song “Stan” by Eminem. It’s an interesting text to use because they are familiar with the term “stan” as it is used colloquially but many are unfamiliar with the song itself. I typically begin by having students read the lyrics, listen to the song without video, and watch the video at varying points throughout the lesson to facilitate discussion about Stan’s characterization.
One of my favorite pieces of literature to teach is “Inside Out and Back Again” by Thanhha Lai. The narrative poetry reads like a book but the stylistic choice of poetry mixed with a journal entry makes this novel a quick read for kids on the surface. However, as we start to unpack the poetry we realize how Ha, the protagonist, uses a multitude of figurative language to make sense of her environment and situation. For example, in one of the poems she describes the violent act of cutting down a papaya and the papaya smashes to show the innards. This is symbolic because life as she knows it is also coming to a violent end as she flees her native home of Vietnam. For this activity I like to bring in a papaya (mostly because many of my students have never seen it) and physically smash it on the floor (yes, my coteachers think I’m crazy beforehand). However, according to, Gloria Schultz Eastman, this allows students to read closely and make meaning of what is happening. She states, “The pedagogical theory behind visual literacy instruction suggests that we must help students become aware that a visual message is a construction.” Thus, allowing a visual representation of smashing a ripe papaya with students allows them to see that this ordinary act is actually very violent and disturbing. Furthermore, according to Eastman, using visual literacy allows students to practice close reading. She states, “The strategy of providing activities that promote visual “close reading” and then providing opportunity to transfer those skills to written text may be especially useful for English language learners and struggling readers, as we help build their confidence in the ability to read both the visual and the textual world.” Therefore, this enables readers to feel confident in unpacking metaphors and figurative language.
Every time I have experimented with visual aids to introduce a reading skill—it starts really successfully and falls flat. For example, my favorite book to teach, Night—has been accompanied with a lesson from the show Band of Brothers. Students visually experience horrors of the Holocaust through this video, and the activity begins to build a bridge between their lives and the empathetic understanding that should be approached when reading Eli Wiesel’s memoir.
Night is beautifully written with great imagery and metaphor, and I often feel I have overlooked that when teaching because of the difficulty it is to teach figurative language to middle school students. Much like the student Ben in Eastman’s article (2015), we focus a great deal on historical context and plot for our students to understand a topic that is unfamiliar. It is not lost on me that we are reinforcing colonial values and teachers who experience frustrations with student writing as mostly summarizing with a lack of analysis. Students exploring a text with self generated questions through a popular mediums like blog posts, social media, and interviews (Seglem, et. al 2018) help give students purpose for a unit. Giving students these avenues of exploration in the text is an act of decolonization because students anticipation of worksheets at the end of a reading like Kirrstein says (Seglem,et. al 2018), shows the monotonous nature of a classroom environment. Teacher’s rationale for worksheets and packets are for retention to help students, however, I can remember doing those activities and never gaining anything out of the reading.
Using visual literacy activities such as video or images….I am teaching Mockingbird this spring and I feel the graphic novel adaptation will provide some great discussion. (I”M NOT GIVING UP ON MOCKINGBIRD!!!) My approach to writing this year is asking students, “Why did the author choose to write this?” why is this specific scene important to the story, because it activates students’ thinking beyond the recall and summarizing method of writing. Eastman (2015) writes, in reference to visual literacy that “students need the ability to infer the implications of the choices made by the creator of a visual text” (p. 41) . Using the Mockingbird graphic novel will help students make the inferences based on how Harper Lee writes a scene versus how it is shown in the graphic novel. Visual literacy would be a great way to translate these skills to reading and writing. Once students gain visual understanding, they can translate that mode of thinking to their reading. I have seen stronger writing because of this “why did the author choose to write this” approach, and incorporating visual literacy, I hope, will aid students who are still struggling.
Resources:
Band of Brothers Ep “Why We Fight” (about 10 minute clip toward end of episode). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ9G16kYXuU
Mockingbird graphic novel https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Mockingbird-Graphic-Novel/dp/0062798189
Some of my favorite pieces of literature to teach in class are ones that students feel connected to. In the past, I have taught “Bodega Dreams,” “Monster,” and “The Hate U Give,” to students that have personal and cultural connections to each text. When reading these, we talk about themes, symbolism, imagery, and critically analyze the world around us in conjunction with the novels themselves. Additionally, I love “The Absolute Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” by Sherman Alexie. Although the students may not connect to the novel culturally, the idea of “multiple identities” is something that I feel all students resonate with in some shape or form—whether it be something like a “school” and “home” identity, or even those who have multiple cultural identities. I’m glad that Swaggy J has not given up on TKAM—because, surprisingly, my students have taken it and ran with it. Using visual supplements such as courtroom graphic organizers and having our own mock trials, character maps/webs, and even the discussions about themes and motifs have really driven my kids to become connected to the novel overall.
Absolute True Diary of a Part Time Indian PDF: http://www.sturgeonenglish.com/uploads/1/3/6/0/13602064/the-absolutely-true-diary-of-a-part-time-sherman-alexie-1.pdf
As I have mentioned before, none of the texts that my school has required have really engaged my students and do not give much leeway to provide visuals to aid in analysis. During my student teaching, I was able to work with the memoir, Night by Elie Wiesel, and it has come to be one of my favorite texts to read and teach with young people. When I first began the introduction to that particular unit, I had the class participate in a gallery walk that consisted of ten different pictures during the time of the Holocaust without much context behind it. The students were completely engaged and made connections to the pictures that they had seen during the gallery walk throughout the entire reading of Night. I wish I had the opportunity to do an activity like this within my own classroom because I feel that the students would relate more to the stories and build more of an understanding to the culture and characters being presented to them. The curriculum that I work with provides a three minute video clip in the beginning of the readings that students can watch to visualize the setting of the story they will be reading. As a teacher that truly likes to dive into the material and create a visual aid for my students, this curriculum does not provide a lot of room for that. According to Gloria Schultz Eastman, “intertextual approaches to visual or
media literacy . . . [are] a means of enhancing the kinds of observational, analytical, and critical thinking skills that are assumed to be fundamental to successful learning in any discipline”. When I had created those visual aids for my students during student teaching, they were able to critically think about the connections they had seen and the memoir they had been reading. I think taking a decolonial approach to literary analysis is allowing educators to bring in different forms of media to have students connect to different texts and explore their own critical thinking skills. For example, teachers could bring in art and pictures that have a correlation to the texts that are being read and explore the texts’ connection to the time period.
Some of my favorite texts to read and teach to young people are: The Hate U Give, The Book of Unknown Americans, The House on Mango Street, and When I was Puerto Rican
One of my favorite texts to read with students is Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” (I definitely need to preface that I only read this text with mature seniors because of its intensity.) Basically, this short philosophical story is about the active choice we make daily to either live as we want, regardless of its impact, or make sacrifices in order to create change. In this sci-fi universe, a utopia’s existence rests on the life of one suffering child. While many people choose to live in the utopia, others leave– and I love discussing these choices with my students, and whether there is any third option. I tend to use this text as a transition between Hamlet and 1984, as we tend to focus on the choices that characters make (and what influences their decision-making process) in both. This short story heavily relies on imagery: first, of the utopia to convince readers of how perfect it is; and second, of the child and their tiny living space. Near the end of the story, Le Guin quickly flashes back to the utopia, and we see it much differently after understanding the cost. The beginning description of the utopia can be boring (because students love drama), so I’ll usually have students create an immersive experience for us so we can understand how perfect it would be to live in Omelas. As Eastman writes, “students need the ability to infer the implications of the choices made by the creator of a visual text;” therefore, I encourage my students to really dive into Omelas to help us experience the perfection (2015). In this activity, students have tried many different methods: a PowerPoint similar to Eastman’s suggestion, a guided meditation, a reading of the text with added sound effects, and even a found poem using the text. From here, students can really grasp Le Guin’s emphasis on the perfection of Omelas, and we’re expecting something to go wrong. Again, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” can be a lot for students, considering the description of the child as well as the real-world connections that could be our own “child.” However, with the right group of students, it can spark an incredibly fruitful discussion about making decisions for ourselves and how we decide what’s right.
When I was in student teaching, we did a dystopian short story unit. Some of the texts were “The Lottery” and “Harrison Bergeron.” The kids loved “Harrison Bergeron” and were really into the story. We talked about themes, irony, and the danger of governments with too much power. We related it to current events and talked about equality and fairness. For “Harrison Bergeron” I used video clips of the short film based on the story entitled 2081. It helped the students to see the severity of an overpowering government and a society that claims everyone is “equal.” There are also videos that I just found that deal with important topics such as, oppression and equality that could help students connect to the story. Visuals not only help students make a connection to a text but also enhance our students’ close reading abilities. As Eastman writes, “Engaging and challenging visual activities can lead to an enhanced ability to read figurative language, a skill that will help students become better readers, writers, and thinkers” (2015, p 41). Videos, images, movies, and other types of visuals are not merely supplements to a text but rather force our students to think deeper and make connections to what they read and the world around them.
2081 Film Clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SICa0tWHzJQ
Videos to teach 2081 in the classroom: https://www.teaching2081.org/supplementary-videos
Prior to teaching at the secondary level, I sometimes co-taught literacy workshops for incoming freshmen at Queensborough Community College. These one to two weeklong workshops served as an introduction to content and acquiring skills that students would later learn more closely in mandatory English classes required prior to college English. (These classes were called “remedial” by many instructors because these particular students did not score high enough on the English Regents to begin taking college level English courses, but I rejected this problematic terminology).
Having freedom with content, I always began the class by watching Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk, “The Danger of A Single Story.” The presentation of this talk allowed the class to adopt a certain tone or theme for the duration of the workshop, which then allowed me to bring in the discussion of stereotypes. Adichie encourages her audience to think of stereotypes as “incomplete,” and therefore having the capacity to change. By encouraging a critical discussion of stereotypes, we were able to look at the ways they were presented both implicitly and explicitly through reading “Mother Tongue” (one of my favorites) by Amy Tan and watching Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing”.
In her article, Gloria Schultz Eastman (2015) presents a number of visual literacy strategies that can be implemented into teaching a text to enhance student learning. While I would have loved to have known about these ideas prior to the workshops I taught, I do believe that I was able, even briefly, to implement ideas of visual literacy by allowing students to engage with the various ideas of stereotypes in both film and text form. After watching “Do the Right Thing,” I showed them the Bed-Stuy street that was named “Do the Right Thing Way” in honor of the movie. This may have allowed them to understand the deep impact the film had on the people of New York and their neighborhoods, and perhaps also allowed them to contextualize ideas of decolonialization into familiar areas of their lives.
All of the texts I have taught to my students thus far were mandated by the schools curriculum, leaving me with little choice to “pick” something that interested me. While they have all been staple texts of high school literature, there could have been better. If I had to select a favorite, it would be my work with “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
An interesting activity of this unit, worked with the visual (yet not actually visual) aid of color descriptions within “Gatsby” along with the social emotional curriculum practice of “The Zones of Regulation.” To have the students understand the usage of color within the work, they were tasked to create a zone log, tracking their color zones, in different classes for one week. “The Zones of Regulation” features four color zones, red, yellow, green, and blue. In tracking their zones, students were able to visually see color, while also making connections towards specific emotions they feel throughout the day. This specific aspect allowed students to engage in critical thinking–students were able to see patterns in their emotions throughout the day, patterns that may be obvious to us as teachers, but oblivious to them. The visual aids of their own color logs, and understanding their emotions associated with red, yellow, green, and blue, allowed them to make stronger inferences amongst color analysis in Gatsby.
I feel this is one way to take a decolonial approach to literary analysis, as it allows students to make personal connections towards each color. Having personal associations to each color allows for a stronger connection towards their analysis of “Gatsby,” as their meanings of color are defined from individual interpretation.
I believe this idea connects with Alia Wong’s article “The Larger Concerns Behind the Teachers’ Strikes” as Wong writes, “…it’s clear that the strike gets at the heart of some of the biggest issues facing America’s children: access to effective teachers, high-quality learning materials, and modern facilities.” Utilizing the SEL curriculum was something I implemented from online research. I did not receive a great deal of “learning” about the curriculum, and I was worried about it triggering students emotionally. However, I tried my best to make a flexible activity that could be used with my limited knowledge. This gets at the heart of the teacher’s strikes, as it is immensely difficult to get access to resources to improve my effectiveness as an educator. Had there been a greater investment amongst my school, or our university, to institute SEL learning, perhaps activities, such as the one I created, would become more dominant–resulting in stronger emotional understanding amongst students.
A basic understanding of “The Zones of Regulation” can be found here: https://www.zonesofregulation.com/learn-more-about-the-zones.html