Overview/Content
What is Chekhov saying about modernity? Why does O'Brien keep bringing up the meaning of storytelling? What is Achebe trying to gain by showing such vastly different versions of masculinity? Not a day goes by in my classroom without a student asking me to explain some overarching theme, literary symbol, or the cultural relevance of a text. Students seek the immediacy of knowing. They usually can find the hints of larger more interesting ideas in a novel, but often struggle with deciding what the explanation is and defending it with evidence. Sometimes it is because students haven't been told what texts mean, but most of the time it is that students haven't been taught how to look at literature analytically and then derive their own meaning from it.
Every year I struggle with getting students to take that leap of faith with their own literary interpretations. It is something I constantly need to work with them on building the tools, skills, and ego necessary for a student to put their all into writing. Throughout the year we work on elements of close reading as a way to unravel a text. As the year progresses, I try to get students to evaluate the patterns of texts and see if they can draw meaning from that. My ultimate goal is the hardest: how do you get students to synthesize what does all of that value mean exactly?
Writing is a very personal instrument, especially for teenagers. I try to allow a lot of space for their voices in writing and am very flexible in their choices for how intricate their arguments may or may not be. My big push in class is evidence. I really try to instill the idea that you can take any possible side of an argument as long as you have enough evidence.
I provide my students with different critical lenses that illuminate texts. For the past two years, my AP English Literature and Composition class has reviewed a variety of literary approaches, including formalist, gender, psychological, and mythological, among others. While I have presented the concept of "authorship," I have not developed a unit focused solely on using biography as an approach to critical thinking. I feel it is an appropriate subject for my class, as a strategy for reading fiction, poetry, and drama (all of which are covered on the AP Exam), while offering insights from both biographical and historical context. Biography is uniquely sensitive to a variety of literary devices: irony, point of view, symbol, tone. In addition, one critical approach will help students understand that each individual's critique of a text is influenced by his or her personal limitations.
Additionally, the topic of biography will augment lessons about main ideas, an author's approach, supporting details, and generalizations/conclusions within texts. My students struggle to recognize which elements of a reading are focus-worthy. They often are challenged when attempting to see similar elements in connections between several different texts. Their culminating project is to create a four to seven paragraph synthesis essay based on documents that have been provided for them answering the question: Who was insert author here>? In order to do this, I have spent a great deal of time gathering documents, creating a question about an author's life, and systematically choosing documents I think students will be able to find correlations between.
For the unit I intend to teach, I have selected nearly 20 solid, comprehensive documents that can be analyzed and used to either support or challenge multiple stances toward Langston Hughes. Using only these documents, I expect students to analyze texts, categorize them, and create a working outline which will finally result in a synthesis essay. By the time they work on this unit they will have read an extensive amount by Hughes and will only need to focus on annotating their texts and carefully analyzing documents provided.
This culminating project will not only reinforce research skills, but will revisit the concept of main idea and supporting details. They will have to decide critically which texts to include or exclude from their project and look for the thread, or through-line, that ties those texts together. By choosing evidence that is important to them, they will write a well-crafted essay, with a clear thesis that is supported by primary and secondary source materials.
Although I envision using this unit for an Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition classroom, I truly believe that all of the lessons in this unit can be adapted for use in a regular or special education course.
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