"Over the Rainbow": Fantasy Lands, Dream Worlds, and Magic Kingdoms

Solutions

I set out to find the innovative, research-based practices to tell me how to lead my students to uncover their latent imaginations, to break through the glass ceilings of their realities. I was struck by this statement about how literature education has trended over the last few decades: “We have thought too much in terms of a will which submits and not enough of an imagination which opens up.”⁹ (imag book 78) This paradigm shift reflects recent trends in American education and testing.  In Teaching and Learning Outside the Box:  Inspiring Imagination across the Curriculum I found helpful theory about leading students in the ELA classroom through literature to deeper understanding of literature and self, and which validated, to me, the use of text selection here. 

An hermeneutic approach

Metaphor is necessary for struggling readers to bridge the literal and the figurative where meaning resides, as created by the reader.  The imagination depends on images to keep meaning real, un-invisible.  “The visual image is the moment when the verbal turns sensible. . . where sense and image are held together in an intuitive manner.”¹⁰  (imag book 78-9)  The melding of the verbal and non-verbal link the intuitive and conceptual, forming “a creative tension between expression and interpretation that can be helpful in the ELA classroom.”¹¹ (book 79)  The suggested verbal and non-verbal, hermeneutic approach to looking at literature breaks from an “objective analysis of texts, nor to the subjective existential analysis of the authors of texts”; rather, it focuses on the worlds created by the reader from the text and author.¹² (79)  We want to shift from what the reader does to the text to what the text can do to or for the reader.  For example, Madoc-Jones explains that questions we often use, such as “What do you think of the text?” or “How does it make you feel?” set pre-existing limitations or potential distractions for interpretive outcomes and use of the linguistic imagination.  He suggests that once the reader is familiar enough with the text, he should instead seek to find how he has changed from the reading experience of that text.¹³ (82)  To become so familiar with the text, the reader must engage individually with it and interact with its words and images.  In my own classroom, I know I have probably discouraged questions or interpretations that seemed odd or irrelevant but were grounded in a student’s original interaction with the text based on her personal experience and culture.  By doing so I possibly closed the door to a student’s engagement with a story or poem, or stifled the urge to imagine or the ability of the student to find his/her reality in the literature.  How often do I or other teachers miss opportunities to cultivate imaginative thought by neglecting to leave space for it in our habitual teaching practice?

A literary text more than an informational text lends itself to richer interaction by the reader.  Visual detail persists and is significant throughout the text. Reality as rendered by a fictional text is open to more varied and personal interpretations. Fantastic or especially imaginative texts and art works further remove readers from predictable or expected interpretations by themselves or their teachers.  Characters, settings, and plots also defy literary expectations.  The gap between the intuitive and the conceptual is greater, but the bridge is hopefully stronger as students work to interact with new language and detail.  The three written texts for this unit share the characteristics of graphic, sustained description and de-familiarizing fiction elements. 

Multimodal literacy

Andrew Schofield also emphasizes the use of “multimodal forms of representation and meaning making.”¹⁴ (123)  Literary understandings are found through varied kinds of texts and media, and “school-based practices need to be inclusive of a broad range of students, cultures, and text formats.  To this end, moving from text to 3-D, multi-layered installation piece, Kara Walker’s Subtlety invites the students to mix language and image to find meaning and reality in a different kind of “text,” one that more closely represents the historical culture of many of my students.  On the flip side, students might select their own modes for demonstrating their meaning making of text.  For example, as one of Schofield’s student’s interest began to grow in The Whale Rider, the teacher, knowing the student well, gave him a piece of cedar with carving tools.  The student asked his teacher how a story could be told in a woodcarving or how a woodcarving could relay a story then worked diligently through symbols and images to ultimately demonstrate his own meaning made of the novel.  Through his deeper engagement he was able to make links to theme and other literary elements he likely would not have otherwise.  Schofield’s students and mine share many academic, social, and legal challenges. 

Grounded in structure

I realize that every student will not be initially skeptical about the nature of the unit.  Some will have happy childhood memories of the Oz film and positive expectations.  Some will be curious.  Yet the central problem of the unit remains.  Motivation comes from interest, and I’ve described several reasons the unit could be a challenge.  After going to such lengths to de-familiarize my students, I also have to provide stability.  As mentioned previously, students must be prepared and empowered by with the use of easy-to-trace elements with which I know they will be comfortable, but which also have value to them as readers. 

Freytag’s Pyramid is a familiar plot outline with which most ELA teachers are familiar, at least in a simple form.  Gustav Freytag’s pyramid has distinctive indicators along a rising and falling plot line with climax at its apex.  The stages from beginning to end of a complete plot are exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, moment of last suspense, dénouement.  Variations exist, as well.  The model is easy to trace through commonly known works like Disney movies and children’s stories. While we read some strange things together, we’ll be able to follow dependable and predictable plot elements among them.

The four main story types we discussed in our seminar are another foundation for solid story reading and writing.  Oz is the journey, and we can study it also as an allegory; Bloodchild is the decision; A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings is a sort of standoff (mixed with other forms), and Subtlety is the discovery, in a way.  Like Freytag’s Pyramid, they are easy to find in stories they already know. 

Finally, all four works have transplanted protagonists, to the sense that the term applies.  As alternative school students who have been often outside of the norm in other ways, mine should identify to some extent with these characters.  This is the final grounding frame for the four works.