Bridging English by Milner and Milner

Reading Better, Reading Smarter by Appleman

A Lens of One's Own: Of Yellow Wallpaper and Beautiful Little Fools

Of Grave Diggers and Kings: Reading Literature Through the Marxist Lens, or, What's Class Got to Do with It?

Critical Encounters in High School English by Appleman

Say:

I appreciate Milner and Milner and Appleman a great deal during these readings about critical synthesis.  Usually when critical synthesis is discussed, we just get a list of different critical perspectives and their definitions.  This is also helpful as it boosted some of my prior knowledge from undergrad, but I appreciate the methods given in Bridging and Reading Better, Reading Smarter, because they tell us how to actually put these different theories into action.  Milner and Milner is also realistic in letting us know that often times critical synthesis is something that we do not get to.  I like to think that it is something that we can address as a teachable moment when a student interprets something through a particular lens.  I do however want to use jigsawing in my classroom in regards to critical synthesis.  I like the idea of having different experts of feminism and marxism to share their views with each other.  While not really a problem, only a nagging that I have is that this will best be suited for juniors or seniors, as my main focus with younger students will be to get them to interpret a text through their own knowledge before I have them go at it from the perspective of a critic.

A Lens of One's Own is interesting not only because of the pun on Virginia Woolf in the title, but also because it uses The Yellow Wallpaper as an introduction to feminist theory.  We often hear the complaint of only teaching stories written by dead white men, and this is mostly true.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story is one of the only feminist stories that is consistently taught in high schools, and it makes for a great place to introduce feminist theory because we can introduce theory as a participatory role that the reader and writer are both involved in.  Gilman set out when writing this story to make a point and without knowing anything about feminism you can probably get the same theme from this story.  Teaching it with feminism allows our students to easily gain that lens so that they can view other works through the same lens.  I think it's cool that in this article they also move from the general to the personal and begin connecting this feminist theory to things the students see in their lives.  This is a great example of how literature can be used to teach social consciousness in our classrooms.

Teaching Hamlet through Marxist theory is something that I really should have thought of before.  I'm realizing that I don't know nearly as much about Marxist theory as I should.  Shakespeare lends itself to the Marxist lens because it is all about class struggle.  We are of course given the idea of grave diggers and kings in the title of this article and it makes sense.  We have the aristocracy all losing their minds and the gravediggers are just making jokes and being wiser than everyone.  This is typical of Shakespeare, especially through his use of fools typically being the wisest.  I think that King Lear would be another good text for this because the conflict is driven by the division of land between the wealthy while the poor are still poor.

Do:

As I said in my Say portion of this blog post, I think that introducing theory to our students seems to me like something difficult.  We really need to do a lot of scaffolding so that they have the background information to read texts through these various lenses.  I think the only time theory was discussed when I was in high school was in the IB theory of knowledge class.  The rest of my English career consisted of either reader response or new criticism.  For this Do blog I have decided to make a powerpoint mini-lesson to introduce some of the basic schools of thought. With critical synthesis, while not ideal, it is just one of those times when we will have to make our students take some notes before we can get into some of the more interesting activities with it.  This lesson plan is based around a unit covering Frankenstein so I would then move into some of the jigsawing that I discussed in my Say so that students can play the roles of different theorists.

Subject: English I Honors – 90 Min

Topic: Critical Synthesis with Frankenstein

Title of Lesson: “I don’t have a clever name for this”

Objectives:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.9-10.1

Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 9-10 topics, texts, and issues, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.9-10.6

Adapt speech to a variety of contexts and tasks, demonstrating command of formal English when indicated or appropriate.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.8

Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is valid and the evidence is relevant and sufficient; identify false statements and fallacious reasoning.

The Student Will Be Able To:

• Understand different schools of literary thought and theory
• Analyze a literary text through the lens of one or more of the schools of theory discussed
• Discuss the text as a class in a way that differentiates the different schools of criticism.

Purpose:

In this lesson, students will be introduced to topics literary theory, particularly in relation to the text of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Looking at texts through a critical lens is not only useful in the classroom.  If gives students a lens to look at the world in different ways, and from view points of others.  This could either be through TV shows, movies, or even advertisements.  

Procedures:

Introduction: (20 Min.)

• PowerPoint lecture on the different schools of thought.  I have allocated 20 minutes, because it seems unlikely that students will have much background in Critical theory so this would likely need to be something that I go into detail on.

Development: (1 Hour)

• Role Playing Activity (Milner 172).
• Students will draw a different school of literary thought at random. They will read it and then throw it away.  We will then have a classroom discussion based around a close reading of Frankenstein (preferably a section with Elizabeth) and the students will each take part in the discussion playing the role of the critic that they drew from the hat.  It will be the job of three to four other students to choose who the critics are role playing as. Sort of like a party quirks game, but with the whole class and with literary critics.
• Jigsaw Groups (30 Minutes) (Milner 172).
• Students will split into groups of four.  Each group will choose one critical school of thought, and discuss the text of Frankenstein through the lens of that school of thought.  After about ten minutes of discussion students will split up into different groups so that they can discuss their findings with other schools of thought.  After the activity, we will come together as a class to briefly discuss what they came up with in their groups.

Conclusion: (10 Min)

• With the remaining time in class we will come together and begin reading the first part of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and discuss any questions they have about the poem before they read the rest of it over the weekend.

Materials

• Smart Board
• PowerPoint presentation
• Notes for Mini-lesson
• Copies of Frankenstein

Evaluating:

During:

During the lesson I will be walking around during group discussions to check off everyone that is participating in discussion.  I will also make a note of who contributes to the classroom discussion though this will be to boost those that speak but not count against those that do not.  Points will be deducted for students who are not paying attention in class discussion.