Rationale
Great stories with relevant themes and motifs never fail to intrigue my student population. Each school year I carefully choose numerous literary works with a firm grasp of my audience in mind. Yet I find that while they seem to enjoy the stories on the surface, they are not able to apply their knowledge and comprehension of the essential formal elements of the narrative texts during later units of study. I am concerned that the depth of analysis of a text is usually lacking. Similarly, my students seem to experience this with any type of film study. Students are overjoyed to hear that a movie is in the offering and they enthusiastically prepare for the experience. Yet despite my heretofore best efforts to help them make the deep, desired connections, there simply is not enough lasting learning taking place. I never show a film for filler or fluff and am usually disappointed in general with the outcome of my film related curriculum. Therefore, I want to connect the two distinct yet similar genres of narratives, literature and film, into a cohesive unit of study. Combining film with literature in my class is a natural fit with regards to the interest levels of my students as they, like most adolescents, are very visual. However, I want to hone my own skills in interpreting and analysis of film so that the addition of film will be more than a reward for reading the novel or short story. Instead, I want to use films as a central component of our curriculum and provide a depth of learning through thoughtful literary and film analysis while at the same time challenge them to think about literature in text format and in film in an evaluative way.
The curriculum unit will focus on the formal element of suspense, along with those elements that are found in the suspense genre such as foreshadowing, point of view, mood, tone, imagery and symbolism. These elements are found in both literary works and in film, and suspense is always a sure way to engage and excite my students. It will be necessary for my students to have a solid foundation of them both in order to ascertain the themes and universal truths that will help them internalize the learning of the elements as well as the fundamental procedures and components of the film medium. Our state standards for eighth grade language arts include that of analyzing how differences in points of view of the characters and of the audience or readers create such effects as suspense. Therefore, suspense will be our organizing concept as we work through it and all of the other literary elements that work together to create great narratives. I want to move away from teaching the literary elements as separate and individual components on a list in the notebook and instead give my students opportunities to identify the elements through analysis of rich, high interest texts and films in a more organic way. The relevance of the elements will be more profound to my students when they have had experience “playing” with them in various mediums. My students tend to connect more profoundly with a concept or topic when they have a personal connection. The universal themes running through narratives, both in film and in written text, allow for my students to connect personally and critically to the literary elements, giving them a relevance that no list of terms could ever provide.
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