Objectives
The learning in this unit is framed by what current educational theorists call "Enduring Understandings."1 These broad and deep concepts underscore the learning in this unit and will lead to the "Essential Questions" that frame our study. I expect students to understand that there are many stories or versions of what is true in historical events. Students will also understand that storytelling serves a social and cultural purpose and helps us make meaning of and organize historical events and personal experiences. Students must also understand that writers, filmmakers, and other storytellers make conscious choices about how to tell their stories and what to include, amplify, or disregard. These understandings are targeted in the questions: Why do we tell war stories? What makes war stories different from other kinds of stories and from each other? What is authorial intent? How do a storyteller's choices affect his or her audience? I am also interested in the related question of how stories relate to history and history-making, which I think will be underscored by our study of the text and films as historical documents.
These deeper understandings are tied to students developing their comprehension and interpretation abilities. We will build reading comprehension skills, focusing on identifying literary elements, genre conventions, and indicators of authorial intent. These skills can also be drawn on in our work with films. I am hoping to have students use prior knowledge of war stories and films to generate their own lists of genre conventions: stock characters, props, themes, and very specific pacing and foreshadowing techniques that drive plots forward to conclusions that often seem inevitable.
Many of the films about Vietnam and The Things They Carried are violent and profane. The films (if they are rated) are rated R and the book, while often taught in high schools, is full of language that is sure to raise eyebrows in more conservative settings. The very presence of this "questionable" material is instructive. I hope my students can come to conclusions for themselves about why war stories are often gritty and at times shocking. This takes us directly into conversations about authorial and artistic choices and the intended effect on audience.
I also want to increase my students' familiarity with the historical period of the 1960s and 1970s and raise their awareness about the social and cultural issues surrounding the Vietnam War. I would like to give them a frame of reference within the pop cultural material on the war, particularly films like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, and others which live large in our cultural legacy. My students may have seen some of these films or parts of these films, but they probably cannot connect them back to the Vietnam War. I would want to fill in the background and give my students more critical tools to understand the material. This content and contextual knowledge is something that my students can capitalize on to make stronger interpretations of film and text.
From comprehension and content-knowledge, my students will construct their own informed interpretations of the material. By the end of the unit I want students to encounter images, oral histories, texts, as well as documentary and feature films and make sense of them. I want them to be able to interrogate these accounts and their creators, asking questions of intention and technique.
It is my hope that equipped with newly honed comprehension and interpretation abilities, my students will be able to demonstrate their understanding of war stories and story/history-making in the writing and telling of their own "war stories." The culminating project or Performance of Understanding for this unit will draw on the skills and strategies developed as we work through the text and films.
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