Introduction and rationale
“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” - Albert Einstein
For several days after Muhammed Ali’s recent death, I found and heard Ali maxims everywhere. Because one fraction of my mind is always percolating something for my seminar or unit, this one stayed with me: “The man who has no imagination has no wings.” I thought about how rich his imagination must have been. Then I thought about how grounded in reality my students are. Burdened with it, really. Their lives are so survival-oriented and rooted in immediacy and basic needs that the imaginative realms are lost to them. My units that have come from previous seminars have ambitiously addressed issues of social justice or the effects of trauma on literacy and writing skill—the realities of my classroom. But what if Ali is right? If not cultivating one’s imagination is equal to sentencing him or her to a life of predictability—which in the case of many of my students is one of recidivism and prison or blue collar jobs that make ends meet at best. Can the ability to suspend one’s belief in fiction transfer to one’s life, goals, dreams? Can the ability to buy into fantasy and the imaginative at least provide escape from the drudgery of a struggling student’s day or life?
My students tend to seek music, television, and movies that reflect comfortably or validate their own lives, it appears to me. Why do they really select what they do? Why do they avoid certain genres like fantasy and science fiction? How do I bridge their lives to fantasy worlds? I’ve had discussions over the years with my students about why many of them don’t like Harry Potter, for example, or why some so resisted Divergent when we read it school-wide. They don’t “get it.” I’ve been depending on relatively safe selections the last few years, assuming we have enough literary struggles in the classroom without fighting to defend what we read more than usual. Still, I have to believe, despite the research I’ve done for previous units, that my students are more complex than the book selections we may put in front of them, with characters that look like and even may act like them sometimes. They love Walter Dean Myers and Sharon Draper—so do I—but their worlds must be stretched to include more. This unit brings the opportunity to indulge in works less grounded in the rough, real world. If Mohammed Ali is correct, my work is cut out for me.
The text and art for this unit were chosen first for their ability to unsettle my readers. Some are dark; The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is certainly not. They will be surprised by each, for different reasons. Two other things hold them tenuously together. First is their ability to de-familiarize—to put students beyond their expectations. Second, they all have transplanted protagonists—some more literally than others. Third, they fall into four universal dramatic categories that were introduced to us in our seminar: the journey, the standoff, the decision, and the discovery. Darker short stories, both mid-length, are A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings by Gabriel García Márquez and Bloodchild by Octavia Butler. The last is an installation piece by Kara Walker: The Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby.
Comments: