Children's Literature, Infancy to Early Adolescence

Rationale

One of the most heartbreaking moments of my teaching career occurred when one of my graduated seniors emailed me from college to tell me she had failed her research paper in English "101". She said that she was very upset because she had worked hard in my class on her research paper and had received a high B from me. Her professor told her that her paper was very superficial and didn't show any insight into the topic. I was devastated, but not surprised. The powers that be at Washington High mandate that seniors complete a research paper, which makes up 10% of their final grade. This is a worthy assignment, but unfortunately the topic is careers.

A career paper is, in my opinion, appropriate for an eighth or ninth grader. It will help the student grasp the skills curriculum they will need for pursuing their chosen path. A high school senior who aspires to become a doctor is not well served when he finds out later that he needs 4-5 units of science and upper level math classes just to be considered for a premed program. In addition to being "too little, too late," the career paper is not remotely like the research papers assigned in college level English classes. It involves no powers of interpretation and no great depth of research; the lion's share of information needed to complete the project can be found on one website, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics online. While research skills are used, a works cited page does not a research paper make.

After lamenting the plight of our students once they reach college, I received permission from our department chair and principal to rework the senior paper. While the AP students were doing a full-on literary research paper, they were still having great difficulty, and I knew my "regular" kids would need a transitional assignment to teach them the fundamentals of expounding on literary works. I still want my students to do the basic research needed for their future science and history classes, but I want them to be able to analyze a piece of literature with the ability the author intended for his or her readers to bring to bear. I want my students to be able to find others who agree with their contentions and also to see the point of view of those who disagree.

A study of folk stories from various cultures around the world is extremely appropriate for World literature, and when the syllabus is structured regionally instead of chronologically, the six to eight weeks spent on the research paper are continually relevant. While seniors respond well to creation stories and various other types of folk mythology, one character has consistently held their attention: the trickster.

According to Wikipedia online, a trickster is "a , goddess, spirit, human or anthropomorphic animal who plays or otherwise disobeys normal rules and norms of behaviour.¹" With a description such as this it is not surprising that the trickster is a high school senior's favorite character. Any given day, a walk through the halls will reveal shirts with Bart Simpson holding a gun or stack of cash, Pacino as Scarface, any number of Looney Toon characters misbehaving, and even occasionally Sesame Street puppets (again, doing something unseemly). My school's culture reveres the con artist or anyone who can get one over on "the man". Why should I not use this fascination to further my agenda, the bulking up of these kids' brains? I have had no problem keeping students engaged when sharing various trickster tales during story time with children's books, having them write original tales in the style of a kid's book, and even staging performances of original trickster tale puppet shows. It therefore seems obvious to me that combining the trickster with my—and their—least favorite assignment, the dreaded research paper, could be a way to sugar-coat the pill.

Tricksters appear in folktales from almost all cultures. They can be varied in form, usually appearing as an animal, man or some combination thereof. Popular forms include, but aren't limited to, a spider-man, coyote, raven, rabbit or leprechaun. Tricksters are usually trying to pull one over on another character, usually a larger or "superior" creature. Often they get away with it; occasionally they are tricked in turn. The best of the tricksters, including the modern American incarnation—the confidence man—can trick a character out of a prize without said character realizing he's been had.

William Hynes and William Doty, in their introduction to Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts and Criticisms, list several correspondences in regards to trickster's traits beginning with:

The fundamentally ambiguous and anomalous personality of the trickster. Flowing from this are such features as deceiver/trick player, shape-shifter, situation-inverter, messenger/imitator of the gods, and sacred/lewd bricoleur.²

In Campbell Reesman's book Cristiano Grotannelli "supports this dualistic view of the trickster's creative consistency-and-irregularity: 'Prometheus is the ultimate example of the duplicity of tricksters; criminal and savior, guilty and heroic, impure and sacred, antagonist and mediator."³ My students eat these character traits up. The trickster proliferates in modern culture in such various forms as Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner to Sawyer on ABC's Lost to the new animated film Hoodwinked. Students already know the character; they just don't know that they do.

Many trickster tales, mostly oral in tradition, share remarkably similar characteristics. A "gum man" appears in the South American story Love and Roast Chicken, a "tar baby" appears in the American slave tales of Brer Rabbit, and the southwestern United States character Coyote gets stumped by a lump of pitch⁴. For my students the recognition of these similarities leads to the realization that the stories traveled by way of the slave trade routes. With some having slave ancestors, my students really enjoy discussing the tradition of oral tales and the passing on of stories to preserve culture.

The trickster lends himself so well to the research project because he is everywhere in a rich literature. After students have a foundation of knowledge about the trickster and background on his stories they will be able to find him featured in literature as well as in subtle references. It is an exciting time for a teacher when the students start making the leaps without help. In her book on myth in American culture, Jeanne Campbell Reesman states: "writers in many traditions have made trickster an elusive but ever-present character in American literature." She also states that the trickster challenges "us to read across historical, cultural, and disciplinary divisions."⁵

As half of the senior English class consists of British literature, finding the trickster in Shakespeare and Chaucer becomes a fun challenge for the students. The trickster pops up in several of William Shakespeare's plays, including but not limited to, A Midsummer's Night Dream, As You Like It, A Comedy of Errors, Love's Labor's Lost, and The Taming of Shrew6. The Trickster makes an appearance in several of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales such as "The Nun's Priest's Tale", "The Miller's Tale", "The Merchant's Tale", "The Pardoner's Tale", and "The Reeve's Tale" among others. "The Pardoner's Tale" and "The Reeve's Tale" are two excellent examples of the trickster getting tricked. My students love to see that death is the one tricking the three drunken rioters in "The Pardoner's Tale".

As we weave our way through World Literature, the trickster shows up in ancient Greek and Roman literature in the form of Hermes/Mercury. As we move forward in time we begin to study areas culturally and find a plethora of folk tales involving him as Iktomi and Coyote in the southwestern United States, Raven in the northwestern U.S., Monkey-King in Asia⁷, Anansi in western Africa, and Legba in the Caribbean⁸. If we have time we will culminate our study with a film depicting a modern confidence man, as in Matchstick Men.

In order for the research paper to address relevant standards, the structure will be the same for each student. The first part of the paper will address the trickster and trickster tale in general. This will allow for cooperative learning, as well as ease in using research facilities. Because Washington has a very weak media center, I inevitably spend two or three weekends at the downtown Atlanta Public Library helping students do their research. When several students can share the research materials, I find they stay at the library longer and find the assignment less isolating.