Rationale
This unit is designed for my Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition course for use at the beginning of the school year. I have tried many units at the beginning of the year with varying degrees of success. During my reflections on those units I began to focus on the two main concerns I have at the beginning of the year. The first is that my students come from a wide range of preparatory backgrounds. Some have been in an AP class before, some students are identified as gifted and have completed highly demanding and accelerated course work, some are coming from a background of my district's equivalent to an honors course, and some are coming from a regular core level English class with no acceleration or stress on college preparation. AP courses are tremendously rigorous and these wildly differing preparation levels provide me with a conundrum commonly experienced by many teachers. How do I make each of my students feel as if he or she can be successful from the start, but how do I also ensure that my more advanced students do not get bored?
My second concern arose from my first. I want all of my students to be successful, so I began to think about the goals of my AP course at its most basic level. The course, at its simplest, is a skills course. Students need to be able to identify a technique within a piece of literature, explain how that technique adds meaning, and explain how the technique functions in the text. The students need to be able to demonstrate this skill in a discussion, in an essay, and on a multiple choice test. If students can get the basics of this skill at the beginning of the year, then they will practice the skill throughout the year, mastering it with a level of sophistication that will enable them to receive a score of a 3, 4, or 5 on the AP exam and be successful in whatever course of study they pursue at university. The purpose of this unit is to engage all students in activities at the beginning of the year that are accessible yet challenging, and enable students to begin to practice the basic skills they will need to master by the end of the year. Focusing on literal and figurative voice is one powerful way to accomplish my goals.
According to Nancy Dean in her text Voice Lessons, "Understanding voice gives students an appreciation for the richness of language and a deeper understanding of literature. Through voice we come to know authors; by exploring voice we learn to wield language" (xi). Her phrase "wield language" touches a cord in me. Language, as many of my students understand in this age of social networking and bullying, can certainly be a weapon. Yet Dean's word "wield" brings to mind images of knights holding a sword high to defend or fight for themselves or a group of people. Kingsolver is certainly having her characters use language within the novel not only to defend, but also to discover and proclaim an idea or set of ideas.
The Poisonwood Bible tells the story of the Price family. Nathan Price, the father, makes the decision to move his family in the 1960's from America to the Congo to be missionaries. Nathan makes all of the decisions for the family, even refusing to take them back to the States when the sponsoring organization tells him to do so. Nathan's decisions ultimately destroy the family and even lead to the death of one of his daughters. Kingsolver's novel centers on providing his wife, Orleanna Price, and her daughters, an unrepresented group of women within the events of the story, the chance to speak for themselves and tell their own stories rather than the one Nathan was forcing upon them. "Reversing Nathan's arrogation of the authority to speak for his family, she denies him a voice in the narrative while allowing Orleanna and her daughters to speak for themselves." 1 These women, in turn, also tell the story of the Congolese people, which begins to touch on the larger ramifications of writing and voice I want my students to consider. Whose story is this? Is Kingsolver telling the story of the Price women who were essentially not able to speak in the novel, or is she speaking for the people of the Congo who were not able to speak when the United States came in and arranged for the assassination of their leader and set up a new dictator? By considering voice and questioning its far reaching implications, my students will hopefully be able to consider how language and writing work for them. It is my goal that my own students learn to "wield language", so that they can move on to be successful readers and writers in any field, but also so that they can then speak for themselves and defend their ideas in writing.
As an English teacher I want my students to find their voices as speakers and as writers. I want them to be able to tell their own stories and to examine the legitimacy of the stories they read. Students who can break down the components of a writer's voice and consider how that writer is using a certain word or word placement to create an effect on the reader are extremely sophisticated readers. Those readers have the potential also to become sophisticated writers. Kingsolver's story is distinctive in that it can be used to examine voice on these more literal levels of style and technique while also raising questions about who is allowed to speak or be heard.
Approaching The Poisonwood Bible through voice makes sense since Kingsolver uses the voices of the mother and the four daughters of the Price family to tell the story of this American family's missionary trip to the Congo. Orleanna and her daughters each have their own interpretations, agendas, and voices. Each character's distinctly different voice and distinctly different way of interpreting and reacting to events the family experiences shape how the reader interprets events. Additionally, the story told in the novel is one of a missionary family coming into a village to change the belief system of those people and of America's involvement in the placement of a dictator as the leader of the Congo and how that affected the people of the Congo. This rich representation of voice by Kingsolver will provide my students with the opportunity to examine how smaller decisions of technique by a writer impact the much larger meaning within a piece of writing.
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