Adaptation: Literature, Film and Society

Introduction

When I first started teaching, I taught a student that had suffered an injury at birth that impaired his physical development. This child relied on a wheelchair to get around the school campus and had to wear special protective devices to support his upper body. This student, who was extremely friendly and worked as hard as he could, received inclusion services to support his academic achievement. When I think back on him, I remember what a thoughtful student he was in eighth grade. He would ask questions about my day to show that he cared and was a good friend to his peers who had grown to look out for him. He was also fiercely independent. He did not want any special treatment. For instance, I remember taking the kids outside at the end of the year to play dodgeball. He made sure to call me out to throw that dodgeball at him, and I gladly obliged. The joy whipping foam dodgeballs at all of my students that day still brings a smile to my face.

Humor aside, the transition into adolescence isn’t easy. In fact, many of the challenges that my students face can even seem daunting and life-altering. Sometimes these changes are. With that in mind, I think it is helpful to think about individuals like my former student who have faced major life challenges and were able to move forward in the best way possible. Helen Keller strikes me as an individual worth exploring with my students. Being deaf and blind, she relied on the support of her teacher and companions to make it through her life successfully. She was born with natural talent that was unlocked with the help of a supporting crew of individuals that had her best interest at heart. In selecting Helen Keller as the subject of extended reading, I hope that my students appreciate the accomplishments of an individual that are more complicated than the commonly-accepted historical narrative of her life.

With that in mind, I would like to explicitly state that the purpose of this unit is not to use her story as a means “to goad students into upright behaviors, or to silence students' concerns or grievances about their own lives.”¹ A teacher taking a didactic approach to discussing Keller’s life risks reducing Keller’s experiences to being viewed solely from a perspective that that is hyper-focused on her disabilities. However well-intentioned, that approach to teaching using Keller’s story diminishes her varied contributions and unique circumstances that she faced during her lifetime. As you will come to see, it is critical to consider Keller’s entire biography instead of focusing exclusively on The Story of Life and its derivative texts. By making students aware of some of Keller’s life actions outside of the texts, students will be able to see the multidimensional nature of Keller and why the melodramatic nature of the The Miracle Worker only captures a small sliver of her life.  

Demographics

Mark Twain Elementary School is a Chicago Public School on the Southwest side of Chicago. The student population consists of 1,109 students, of which 83% are considered low income. The population is also roughly 84% Hispanic and 13% White with a large population of Polish- speaking students. Students that receive special education services account for roughly ten percent of the student population; and students that receive bilingual services account for another 16% of the student population. This unit is designed for roughly 120 sixth grade general education students. These are students that would have very little exposure to drama as a literary genre and possess little academic language that goes along with film study.²

Enduring Understandings

• There are many key terms associated with the study of film: different types of shots, angles, transitions, and cuts. These elements represent choices the filmmaker makes in order to tell a story.
• Drama is s a play that can be performed for theatre or television. Dramas are written out as a script and are performed by actors.
• When we read about others who face difficulty or hardships like Helen Keller, we can learn about the circumstances that influence their choices. We don’t read to judge someone but to understand their circumstances and individual decisions.

Essential Questions

• What is the language of film? How is it similar or different from language we use to describe narrative writing?
• What is drama? How should we approach reading, watching and performing a drama?
• What can we learn from Helen Keller’s life experiences?

Implementing District Standards/Suggested Instructional Sequence

Two Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are at the heart of instructional planning for this unit: CCSS.RL.6.3 and CCSS.RL.6.7. The focus of CCSS.RL.6.3 is to “describe how a particular story’s or drama’s plot unfolds in a series of episodes as well as how characters respond or change as the plot moves forward toward a resolution.³ To master this standard, students must be able to identify how a story gets from the beginning to the end. This involves teaching students about the arc of a story, how characters respond to conflicts when they are introduced and how these conflicts shape individual characters as the narrative progresses. Mastery of the standard is reflected when students are not only able to explain the impact of events on specific characters, but students should also be able to infer a larger theme that relies on details from the text. The anchor text of the unit, The Miracle Worker, lends itself well to this type of work.

The other CCSS that is key to planning in this unit is CCSS.RL.6.7. The focus of CCSS.RL.6.7 is to “compare and contrast the experience of reading a story, drama, or poem to listening to or viewing an audio, video, or live version of the text, including contrasting what they "see" and "hear" when reading the text to what they perceive when they listen or watch.”⁴ To demonstrate mastery of this standard, students must be able to leverage both the academic language that they have for fiction with the various film medium techniques that are used in film to compare the two texts. This involves instruction in the language of film and drama to build the capacity for students to understand how one medium amplifies and brings life to the other. Direct instruction of film and drama technique needs to go together with robust student discussion of film and drama to get students to understand that similarities and authorial choices exist across narrative mediums.

This unit will complement the work that is expected of students in other units throughout the school year. I envision starting the unit with excerpts of The Story of My Life and sharing some of the content that I learned about Helen Keller that highlight her role as a vocal activist. From there, I plan on introducing students to drama as a genre and close reading and performing parts of The Miracle Worker in class with students. Once we have exhausted the written text, I will provide a brief introduction to doing a close reading of film and have students consider the choices that were made by the director in adapting the text to film. We will watch the film, pausing to discuss it at key scenes, and students will write a short paper tracing the choices that director made after a robust class conversation.