Workshop Narrative

William Kee

EDSE 786

Dr. Styslinger

7 December 2015

Workshopping Huck Finn

For my resource collection I chose to organize a unit based around Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  I chose this canonical text for a few reasons, the first being that it is one of my favorite books that is commonly taught in high school classrooms.  It is both funny and exciting while also offering an honest and important commentary about social justice in the United States that is still important today.  While there are many topics to be explored in Huck Finn, I decided to focus my unit around the theme of ‘Surviving in a Prejudiced Society.’ This is shown through the struggles that Huck and Jim face as they go on their adventures, and particularly through Huck’s struggle with what he believes to be the right thing to do, and what society expects of him.  

Huck Finn is known for its use of southern dialect.  In my experience, this dialect is known to throw readers off.  In order to scaffold them into this, I will kick this unit off by reading aloud a picture book.  Helen Ketteman writes her picture books in dialect.  The dialect that Ketteman uses is indeed southern, but it is not quite as hard to comprehend as Huck Finn.  In her picture book Heat Wave! Ketteman uses words like ‘ma’ and ‘pa’ as well as the lesser used ‘hollar.’  I plan to kick the unit off by reading this aloud in an animated fashion while really laying the accent on thick so that students can begin to hear how the best way to read this text is to think about how you would say it out loud.  

I will also do another thing before I actually introduce Huck Finn to the students.  For this unit, and hopefully most of my units, we will be having book clubs.  The young adult novels that I have included in this resource collection all focus on the themes of a protagonist going against the societal norm in order to do what he or she believes to be right.  In order to get book clubs started, I will have a book pass where I pass out Day of Tears, The Day they Came to Arrest the Book, The Absolutely True Diary of  a Part-Time Indian, 47, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, and The Crazy Horse Electric Game.  Students will pass around books and select their top three.  I will then figure out who will get what book and pass them out the next day in class.  I like Styslinger’s idea of alternating between book club books and the canonical text so that each gets the same amount of time.  During book clubs I will not participate.  I will walk around a listen, but the students will be on their own for the discussions.  They will have autonomy.

After getting students excited about the books for their book clubs I will introduce Huck Finn.  I will be sure to explain to my students how Huck Finn connects to the books they will be reading for their book clubs.  I expect myself to say something along the lines of, “I know you have probably heard awful things about this book from students who are older than you, but how many of you have been in a position where you thought you were right and a parent, or teacher were wrong?” This is not only a good way to get students interested in the book, but also a good way to get students to begin transacting with a text before they even begin reading.  I could frame this as a class discussion, but first I could have students write down what they have heard about Huck Finn from older students and then have them answer the question that is closer to a representation of the theme of this lesson.  Of course, we would have class discussion after students have shared their answers with a partner.  From here, we have students transacting with the text through title testing and personal response.  When we begin reading, we can connect these responses to the beginning of the novel when Huck runs away from his father.  This activity would be the jumping off point for me to begin reading the novel to them and then have a discussion after.

I mention in the paragraph above that I will begin reading the novel to the students.  I think that reading to the students is critical to their interest and understanding of the text.  The books that I give them in the book clubs will be read on their own time of course, but Huck Finn is not something that students need to read at home.  There are some heavy topics and the obvious word choice that students need to be guided through during whole class reading.  Subject matter aside, if students are struggling with the dialect in this text, they are just going to get frustrated and give up if it is assigned to them.  If I read it to them in class, I can pronounce the dialect in a way that is easy for them to understand.   It is also important that we do not call on students, or have students ‘popcorn’ read.  If students are going to read in class, they need to already be familiar with what they are going to be asked to read.  They also need to be willing.  Forcing students who do not want to read aloud into reading for the whole class is just another way to make sure that students hate reading.  

Another important aspect of doing all the reading in class is ‘advancing the plot.’  There is a lot of floating along down the river in Huck Finn and even for someone interested in the book, these parts tend to lag.  If we skip over some of these parts and just give students a summary, it will allow them to hold interest while still getting a good understanding of what is going on in the novel.  After all, if we are using these works to teach around the theme of ‘surviving in a prejudiced society’ then it is not necessary for us to read the parts of the text that do not contribute to our students learning about this theme.  We have also been told that often when teachers advance the plot students will go back and read those sections on their own time so as not to miss anything and to inform the class of what the teacher has chosen to skip over completely.

Our standards dictate that the basic breakdown for what kind of writing out students need to do is split between argument and explanatory writing.  I think that the best way to teach students about argument is to have them have class discussions.  This is where the informational texts category in my list comes from.  The informational texts in my resource collection serve as mentor texts to teach students about informational and argumentative writing.  I will use these in class to teach students about the structure, but I will also ask students to write down things that they notice about the article, and how they think these articles relate to Huck Finn.  Once they all have something written down, I will circle them up and we will do a Socratic Seminar.  Now, I like the idea of a Socratic Circle with a hot seat because I know that sometimes it is too much to not say something when you are listening from the outside of a discussion.  I also want to set it up so that students in the outer circle have two or three note cards so that they can write questions and hand them to the people in the inner circle.  The point here though is so that students have a mentor text that they then find an argument for and defend that argument in the Socratic Circle.  Here, they are citing evidence from the text, providing backing for their arguments, and even addressing real rebuttals to their arguments. This is a fun way to get them to form arguments that they can then take and put into their argumentative writing.

The picture books I have chosen for this resource collection are not only a good way to introduce dialect in writing to students, but they are also a good stepping stone to get students into formal analysis.  The novel Huck Finn is written much like any other novel, except that it is written in this form of dialect.  We not only need to teach students how to understand the dialect in this story, but we also need to teach them why Mark Twain has chosen to use this dialect in his novel.  What does this do for the story that writing in standard English would not.  We can also use music here. How does the word choice, affect how we recieve Lenny Kravitz’s “Mr. Cab Driver?”  We can use this to get students talking to each other about how this story is written, and how voice affects the telling of stories in general, not just Huck Finn.

The obvious theoretical lens to use when looking at Huck Finn is critical race theory.  Critical theory is something that I struggle finding a place for in the class room.  It is of couse, where we all want to get, and why we love English to begin with, but it is one of the last things we are able to get to.  I want to shape my units around critical theory.  At the beginning of a Huck Finn unit for example I would introduce critical race theory to students through a mini lesson, and ideally we would have already been going over another theoretical lens in the units before.  I would eventually work towards students looking at this text through different lenses.  The best way I think to do this is to put them into groups and jigsaw them.  Each group has a different lens and then I split the groups so that each group consists of one of each different lens and each ‘expert’ explains their theory to the group.  This way, we do not focus on one theory, and students are able to teach each other about what they have discussed in their groups.

What I have learned this semester, and over the course of this program so far is that we need to have a long range plan for teaching our students.  We can not just go into a unit knowing that we are going to be teaching a specific novel.  These resource collections offer us tools to use in our classroom as we form units around these particular texts.  Students are likely not willing to read canonical texts of their own accord, but they will be receptive of reading the next hot young adult novels, or even some nonfiction news articles.  We can workshop canonical texts by using these other sources to bridge the gap and hopefully students will be more interested in what we have to teach because they will be excited about what we don’t have to teach.