Strategy (Past and Present)
Most students, by the time they get to AP English, are familiar with Aristotle's plot line of introduction/rising action/ climax/falling action/denouement that is usually understood to be underlying most narratives. Still, a quick review of this structure could be helpful because a narrative segment is usually considered a micro-version of this pattern. Inside the text, these segments can be demarcated by a significant change in setting, action, or any other kind of shift in the flow of the narrative, not necessarily in the characters' lives. The narrative space in between these shifts can be thought of as a narrative segment.
In my experience I have found that it is best to start with a fairly innocuous film, one that is easy to follow and does not give rise to a lot of emotional investment, something light and enjoyable. Whatever film you choose, I strongly encourage you to preview it with pen and paper in hand so that you can perform your own quickly sketched segmentation. This will give you a feel for the rhythms of the film and help you facilitate the students' own segmentation. It is important though that you do not impose your segment divisions on your class. Once they have begun their work, then you can guide, but you will find that they will generally agree with one another. Nor is it necessary that they all always agree about where to break it up, though they should be asked to defend and justify their decisions, either in discussion or in writing. My first segmentation was done with Richard Linklater's School of Rock, which worked wonderfully.
The ideal situation is to show the film all the way through once before beginning to work on it. This may seem like a lot of time given over to watching movies but I have found that it is time well invested. If they can master this skill then the pay-off will be ongoing. I did this with School of Rock and it worked very well. As they watched it, they did take brief notes on it and we had a short follow-up discussion to ensure that everyone had the basic synopsis of the film. It is important that this discussion not be one of "Well, I liked it because. . ." or "I didn't like this part. . .." We are not interested in their tastes but rather their ability to parse a narrative to justify how meanings are crafted. I then showed it a second time, in five-minute increments, so that it was divided arbitrarily but in small enough portions that they could remember clearly what had gone on. At each five-minute mark I would pause the film and give them a chance to take notes on the narrative and to begin the dividing of it. They should be formulating in their notes the reasons for their segments. A discussion of this allows them to consolidate their choices and provides for a dividing of the entire film. Many of their choices follow existent edits in the film and this is exactly what you are hoping for because it moves the discussion to the choices the filmmaker made when constructing the narrative. In this case, why did Richard Linklater make the choices he did? What is he trying to convey by constructing segments the way he does? Going through the film in short increments also allows students to begin picking up on some of the basic film techniques that help to craft our understanding of the segments. An example from this particular film is the use of soundtrack music. Anytime an edit to a new scene includes upbeat "classic" rock music, Jack Black's character, Dewey, is going to solve another of the obstacles that are keeping him from his goal. For this kind of analysis the students do not need a sophisticated understanding of all the film techniques, just some basic knowledge which can be gained through a basic film text or can be found on the Yale film studies website6.
What we found the second time through is that nearly all of the choices that Linklater made about how to craft the film are working together to drive the narrative, to focus our attention on how Dewey will reach his goal. Within the opening seven minutes of the film Linklater has used an overhead shot of Dewey lying facedown, first on the floor of a club after an unsuccessful stage dive which transitions to the same camera angle, this time to Dewey facedown in bed. Linklater uses this "Dewey on the bottom" shot to introduce us to the myriad of problems that are weighing him down. He is confronted by a lack of money to pay his share of the rent, an extreme dislike for his roommate's girlfriend, lack of a job, and being fired by his band. All of these conflicts set in motion the events that will set Dewey on the pathway to discovery and on this journey he will learn ways to resolve these conflicts. These small events inter-relate and work together to comprise the larger concerns of the film. Breaking them into segments begins to demonstrate to the students that the overarching narrative was driven by decisions at the micro-level. This is where they began to see that it was more than just a movie about a guy trying to form a band. By looking at the film in small segments, they began to see connections between these segments. These links, when stretched over several segments, began to bring forth some of the themes of the film. Dewey comes to understand that education is not a waste of time; he both learns to teach and in turn is taught by the students. The sarcasm and outright contempt he has for his roommate's desire to become more than a substitute teacher is repeated for the school's policies when he becomes a substitute teacher. Yet when he begins teaching rock history, rock appreciation, etc, he finds himself imposing structure and work on the students. Both the students and Dewey have their perspectives on life broadened. Dewey learns that not all revolutions are loud noisy ones that physically tear down societal structures, some are quiet ones that infiltrate and change societal thinking by using the means of society. This is the case when, at the end of the film, he starts his own school, a school of rock. All of these larger themes are slowly revealed to us by much smaller events, the order in which they are revealed, and the way these events are delivered to us in the film.
At this point I placed the students in small groups with instructions to craft a completed segmentation for the entire movie as well as to place the multiple smaller themes into larger categories. A follow-up discussion allowed the students to exchange perceptions and their understanding of the interlocking categories. This then gave them the necessary foundation to demonstrate their new-found skill in writing. To ensure that they have mastered this analytical skill, I asked them to identify one of the major themes and justify its importance by demonstrating that it permeates the film. Another closing assignment might ask them to evaluate Linklater's success in building one of his overarching themes. This would also require them to be able to point to specific moments in the film and use them to advance an argument as to the merits of Linklater's construction of the film. Both of these assignments are good practice for the kinds of writing that students will have to do on the AP exams where they will have to be able to marshal evidence from a text to build a case for a specific interpretation.
Essentially what segmentation does is give the teacher another means to develop close reading skills in the students. It also immediately capitalizes on these skills by asking the student to use the information that they have unearthed to formulate an argument. Very little of what happens in a segmentation unit is actually teacher directed. Rather, what you are doing is giving the students the means to develop the classroom discussion. If they all participate (and that is why using film is such a great hook), then they all have the means to contribute to the discussion and to any kind of group or individual writing that you choose to use as follow-up.
Since the students are developing close reading skills of narrative in this exercise then it becomes transferable to literary works as well. Narratives, whether in film or literature, share many of the same characteristics and thus are subject to similar methods of reading. Without drawing the parallels too closely, the devices that make a film — the edits, shots, sequences, lighting, camera moves, soundtrack, etc. - function as a kind of language and thus can be read as such. So the jump now to literature should not be that dramatic for the students. In order to make the transition as easy as possible, I use either short stories or works told in vignettes, like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried or Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, which I will be using this fall. These two novels are both comprised of short chapters, some as brief as two pages, and the chapters can, if necessary, be understood in isolation from the rest of the novel. Thus they make good works to use as they allow for any difficulties to be worked out without any student being left behind.
I have used the chapter from O'Brien's novel entitled "The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" and it has worked well. The basic principle remains the same. Ensure that all of the students have the same text (important if you are in a place where the students will be purchasing their own texts). Then have them go through the same process, though now you can have them do the first reading and the segmenting in one move or over the course of several days as you discuss the text in class. On an assigned day they should have their segmentations in class with them. I have found success in placing them in groups at this point, asking each group to arrive at a master segmentation. This gives them the chance to interact with each other with regard to their findings and I have found that many of these conversations are full of debate with students referencing the text in order to make their case. From here I had them appoint a spokesperson from their groups and we organized their group segmentations into one for the whole class.
Once we have an agreed upon segmentation, I send them back to the text to look inside each narrative unit and re-examine them for possible thematic elements, smaller conflicts, character development, anything that seems to advance our knowledge or understanding of the text. In "The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong" this includes Rat Kiley's discussion of storytelling and lies in the first pages, Maryanne's dancing to music (occurs twice in the story), the descriptions of Maryanne's attire and the way she and her boyfriend, Fosse, set up housekeeping in the early part of the chapter. These and other details that fill out the narrative in small but soon to be revealed important ways were spread out throughout the text. As they revealed themselves in our readings and discussions, we moved from the micro details to macro issues or themes such as of the nature of storytelling, descriptions of the emotional side of war, the very specific use of music as a marker of an important reversal, as well as early 1960's gender roles and their reversal.
The students' conversations and the work that they performed while they developed their narrative analyses resulted in the class discussion mentioned in the first paragraph, the one that helped me to realize that this might be more than just another exercise. The close reading that a successful segmentation demands gave the students a sense of power over and ownership of the text. It gave them the tools necessary to take a text apart in such a way that not only their understanding improved, but they also realized that they had the skills to get what they needed from a text in order to craft and justify their own interpretations. If segmentation can bring this dynamic to my classroom on even an occasional basis, then it is worth the time and effort it may take to teach students to do it. It gives them the means to engage with texts on a critical analytical level, providing them with the feeling of confidence in their abilities that I want them to have when they take the AP exam.
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