Stories around the World in Film

Strategy Two (Future)

In this lesson, I use a variation on segmentation to give my students an approach to poetic mood and effect. Segmentation looks at what is already there visually and divides it into discrete narrative/textual units. For this lesson I reverse the process. Instead of looking at what is already there, the way segmentation does, I teach them to start with the text and craft what is to come visually, as if they were the filmmaker. They, in effect, become the ones creating the segments because I am asking them to break a poem into small constituent units and storyboard it. This approach helps them to analyze a poem and the effects that poetic elements have on their understanding of it. By looking at it in small pieces they begin to see how the poet structured the poem to craft specific effects and mood. I call the resulting storyboard a "film poem" and I have found that it is especially useful for getting those resistant readers of poetry into the often more difficult lyric poetry. By using the film technique of storyboarding, students are forced to examine the poem in small units and are able to understand how the poet builds an overall effect through diction, syntax, and stylistic choices.

Lesson Two Methodology

The work to be done to get this lesson started begins with deciding on a list of poems to be used. The text my district uses is Michael Meyer's The Bedford Introduction to Literature, which includes an extensive amount of poetry to draw from. This text allows me to compile the list with regard to the poetic elements or types of poetry my students need practice working with. At this point you can choose to create a list that is long enough so that no two students will have the same poem or you can structure it so that there will be more than one student per poem. It all depends on whether you want to allow them to work together later on in this lesson. It is crucial to pick poems that are not overtly narrative or too long. While I hesitate to give a specific length suggestion in terms of line numbers, try to judge the appropriate length by bearing in mind what you are asking the students to do with the poem.

At this point, ask the students to choose a poem from the list. I recommend that you not tell them exactly what they will be doing with the poem just yet, only that they will be working with it rather extensively. This helps eliminate any tendency to choose a poem based on what they will be doing with it. I would rather they choose a poem that appeals to them, even if it is for reasons that they do not understand yet. I also recommend that you give them a day or two to look over the poems on the list in their text. Encourage them to read some of them and consider their choice. Not every student will do this, of course, but if you tell them that they will be answering a set of poetry analysis questions to go along with the poem of their choosing, it tends to spur them on.

Once they have chosen their poem, then assign them the questions to answer. These should be basic "getting into poetry" type questions, general enough to be used for any poem. Meyer's book gives a useful set of suggestive questions early in its introduction of poetry.⁸ Most literature anthologies have something like this. Give them a day to complete this and ask general questions in class, though try to steer clear of in-depth interpretive questions. The goal is to give them the tools and practice at teasing out meanings and effects so that they can improve their reading and interpreting skills that are necessary for the AP exam rather than you telling them what the poem means.

Now you may introduce the lesson proper by teaching the students to storyboard. Storyboards are used by many filmmakers to lay out each shot in their film. They look like a comic strip in that they tell the story in images without dialogue but they also give information regarding the camera angles, movements, and composition of each shot. The images in each square will closely resemble the image for that shot in the final film though at times there are differences. Many DVDs have storyboard — shot comparisons in their special features and bringing in a few of these would be helpful for students.⁹ Work through this with the students, showing them a few scenes from a film and then looking at the storyboards, or even asking them to storyboard a film clip. The breaking down of a scene will reveal the thought process that goes into filming. By looking at this they will be enhancing their ability to dissect texts as they begin realize how the seemingly smallest decisions of a filmmaker work to create meaning and effect. With all of this in mind, they are now ready to begin storyboarding their poems. Remind them that each frame in a storyboard conveys a limited quantity of information and that is the whole storyboard that conveys the overall meaning. Likewise their frames should focus on small but significant units of the poem — a line, a phrase, an image created by figurative language. They must be cautioned against trying to capture the whole poem in a shot or two. This would gloss over too much of the author's work instead of revealing it, which is their goal.

In their storyboarding they also need to include the text of the poem. One of the goals of this lesson is to have the students explore the relationship between the language of the poem and the images that language creates. This can be done in several ways. They can plan it as a voice-over narration in which case they must then plot out which lines will be said in which shots. They can run it as subtitles, again carefully laying out where the lines go. Or they can do it in the style of silent films; they can show the text on intertitles. This is a good place for a discussion of the power of language to control the way we see images, which is precisely the work of the poet. This similarity can be drawn upon and is useful for establishing a relationship between the work the students will do in this lesson and the work of a poet. Any chance to demystify the work of the artist and reveal the processes behind it are useful for engaging the students' in their attempts to interpret the artwork. So requiring them to include the text asks them to look at it again and consider how to segment it to achieve maximum effect in their film. At this point a student is bound to ask about incorporating music into the storyboard. I usually say "No," simply because it tends to clutter up their thinking when I want their focus to be on the text and their response. If it gets to a point where we will actually make the films, then I will reconsider music but only if it is adequately justified. This is also the time to discuss what can be used as images. There are two ways to approach this. One is to let them imagine anything they want, so long as it is appropriate for the classroom. The result will generally be something that is impossible for most students to actually film. That is fine if you only want to focus on the text and your time is limited. The second way is to tell them that the images are constrained by what is immediately film-able at school. While this initially limits their choices, it forces them to think deeply about what images in their location carry the multiple meanings that they will need. It also holds out the possibility that it could be filmed if there is enough time. This can provide a great incentive to the students and if it can be pulled off, it is richly rewarding.

Normally, under each frame in a storyboard the filmmaker will give information about the camera angle, movement, lighting, etc. In addition to that you should ask for a little more. The students need to include under each frame several sentences that briefly justify that image with regard to the actual text of the poem, specifically the diction and the syntax. While the images themselves can be almost anything, this is where the assessment of the students takes place. In these short paragraphs they need to demonstrate the relationship between the image and the poem. This is where they should be invoking the text of the poem, the elements of poetry, and exploring how these things work to create effects. Because this type of analytical justification is precisely what they will have to do on the AP exam, this lesson helps them to start thinking about the relationships between language and its effect.

At this point you have several options for the rest of the lesson. The first option is to collect the work and move on. This is enough to get the students to begin thinking about the nature of language to craft images and makes for an excellent starting point for the study of poetry.

Your second option is place them in groups and have them develop a Hollywood style pitch on which film poem deserves to be made. This is especially useful if there are several students who did the same poem. They can then decide whose film poem is the best and provide written justification for their choice. This provides another opportunity for them to argue their decision based on the text and one of their peer's interpretation of it. Again it takes them back to the text and forces them to wrestle with the actual diction and syntax of the poem. This also has the advantage of not having a right or wrong answer. Instead the evaluation is based on their ability to marshal the text in support of their reading of it. This ability is necessary for success in AP as well as college.

The last option is generally the students' favorite option and that is to make the film poems. This requires a video camera and the means to edit the footage as well as the time to do this. This can be done very easily and inexpensively on a computer, if not the one in your room then there is probably one on campus that can. Some of your students will have the means to do this at home and though I discourage that, the choice is yours. If they do it at home, you have much less oversight into what they are doing, how on task they are, and your deadline is at the mercy of their equipment and any possible failures of it. By doing it at school, on your school's equipment, and during your class time, you exercise far greater control over how they use their time and what gets done by the deadlines. However, you will probably want to put them into groups and go through the process described above in the second option since you will not have time to have everyone make a film poem. This time though you will allow them to act upon their Hollywood pitch provided that their choice is filmable at school. While one group is filming, you should go ahead with teaching the others. This is often a good time for AP test practice and review. Once all the films (if you have time for more than one) are made then they can be shown in class as a little festival and the students, who by now should be familiar with all the poems, can argue, in writing, for which one is their favorite. By now they have spent more time with a poem than they ever thought possible and have dug more deeply into it than a normal research assignment would have prompted them. They have had to wrestle with the complexities of the poem, its language and structure, and how to make meaning out of those complexities. It is another way that literature can be seen as rhetorical.

Lesson Plan Two

Goal: To develop students' abilities to read a poem closely and analytically through the use of storyboarding.

Objectives: As a result of this lesson students will be able to:

1. Examine the ways in which poems are crafted and gain understanding that poets use strategies at the micro level to create larger effects,
2. Defend the choices they make regarding the images the poem invokes in them, especially by appealing to the poem's diction and syntax,
3. Write an evaluative essay in which they argue for a particular interpretation of a poem.

Student materials: pen, paper, a textbook from which the poems will be pulled or a separate handout of poems to choose from.

Teacher materials: textbook, board, markers, 11x17 paper for the students to use for their storyboards, rulers, a set of questions for introducing the study of a poem to students.

Procedure:

1. Craft a list of poems that you want the students to work with, either from a textbook or on a handout.
2. Allow the students to choose a poem from the list. The list should be sufficiently long to minimize the number of students choosing the same poem or, conversely, if you will want them collaborating later, then the list should be short enough so that there will be overlap.
3. The students are then given a day to work with the poem, using poetry analysis questions drawn from the textbook or your own set.
4. Introduce the students to the concept of storyboarding. Use examples from films if you have them or demonstrate on the board.
5. Give the students the first part of the assignment — to storyboard the poem as if it were being turned into a film. They also must include the text of the poem in this, either in voiceover narration, subtitles, or intertitles. You should also hand out the 11x17 paper here and rulers if they are needed.
6. In addition to shot information, the students need to justify the shots they are using, they need be able to connect and justify the images they associate with the text. They should include a short paragraph for each shot explaining how the poet's diction and syntax generate the image/shot they are suggesting.
7. At this point you can collect their work and move on. However, if you have the time and the means there are several extensions of this assignment that can be carried out that will further enhance the students' abilities to work with poetry.
8. You can put them in groups and have them work with the set of poems they have and/or group them by overlapping poems. Out of this group they must choose the one film poem that they decide is the best interpretation of the poem. They then defend their choice in writing with appeals to both the storyboard and the text.
9. If you have the means you can also have them decide as a class on the best film poems. These can then be made into actual films if your school or your students have the means. Devise your own deadlines for this. The result can be fun and eye opening, especially if you have the time to have little film poem festival in class where they are all shown and discussed. Again there is room here for a written assessment of the filmmakers' interpretation with appeals made to the text and the film.