“Now I'm awake to the world. I was asleep before. That's how we let it happen.” -- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale.
“The sleepwalkers are coming awake, and for the first time this awakening has a collective reality; it is no longer such a lonely thing to open one’s eyes.” -- Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”
Introduction
A week before introducing The Handmaid’s Tale to my students over Zoom during a pandemic, Trump supporters, wanting to overturn the electoral vote for the 2020 election, invaded and vandalized the United States Capitol building for several hours, disrupting and attacking Congress. Shocked at what we saw, my students and I discussed what happened and they conveyed their feelings of unease, fear, and anger at the event.
A week later when we were reading the dystopian novel, we got to the part where it explained how Gilead was formed. Describing how the Gileadian coup began, the main character and narrator Offred reflects, “Now I'm awake to the world. I was asleep before. That's how we let it happen. When they slaughtered Congress, we didn't wake up. When they blamed terrorists and suspended the constitution, we didn't wake up then, either. Nothing changes instantaneously. In a gradually heating bathtub, you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.”1
I hadn’t taught The Handmaid’s Tale for several years, so I had forgotten about this part -- how Gilead started. The day we discussed this chapter of the book, my students obviously drew parallels to the recent events that occurred the previous week, floored by the eerie similarity. We spent a good deal of class time speaking about how a society could let this happen. Students made comparisons to Nazi Germany and the Iranian Revolution of 1979, as we just read Persepolis. We discussed social movements and revolutions, both present and past, and I began to realize the importance of teaching students about the power and structure of these events to not only help them understand fiction, but their reality as well.
With this unit, I intend to have students truly understand what a social movement is and the inner-workings of how social movements organize, mobilize, and implement change. Even though my students are 16-17 years-old, I want them to know that their voices and opinions matter. After my many years of teaching, I continue to see my students be more and more civically and socially engaged. From gun control walkouts to protesting at Women’s Marches and Black Lives Matter rallies, my students, more than ever, are speaking out against social injustices. With that in mind, having students understand how a social movement works and planning their own, even if it is fictional, will allow them to see how their voice-- their participation in a social movement can fight against social injustices in our world.
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