Beyond the Text
Final Task: Possible Solutions
The culminating task for this unit will emulate the idea of “possible solutions”: students will think about the problem of inequality as it is presented in 1984 and come up with their own possible solution. I want to focus our “possible solutions” discussion on the concept of education, especially because we would have already discussed the concept of Civic Education.
As I was reading The Prize by Dale Rusakoff, I was struck by the following excerpt that described a politician’s view on Newark public school students:
“In 1967, Governor Richard Hughes appointed a commission to investigate the causes of the riots. Its report stated, of urban renewal, ‘In the scramble for money, the poor, who were to be the chief beneficiaries of the programs, tended to be overlooked.’ And, because of “ghetto schools,” most poor and black children ‘have no hope in the present situation. A few may succeed in spite of the barriers. The majority will not. Society cannot afford to have such human potential to go to waste” (27).
Despite the fact that this description is about Newark, New Jersey students, I have heard people express similar sentiments about Mt. Pleasant High School--including a teacher at the school. There are adults who do not believe that students from certain areas are capable of achieving academically, and that is true of opinions about my own school. This idea is so ingrained that many Mt. Pleasant students think this way about themselves. Many have a fixed mindset, and I hope that this focus on education as a force for change asks my students to employ more of a growth mindset as they think about fictional--and factual--solutions to problems.
There will be multiple options for students to communicate their possible solutions; including writing a chapter that represents an alternative ending to the novel, creating a propaganda poster to inspire the characters to do something, writing a letter to the government proposing a reason and way for them to change the system, etc. Options will be presented to students in the form of a menu from which they will be able to choose how they complete the final task.
After students have explored possible solutions and applied them to 1984, they will complete a reflective journal activity in which they think about the solution that they chose and whether or not it would work for any real world issues, especially the ones we brainstormed as a class and tagged on the whiteboard, which would still be displayed. Students would think about how they would have to adapt or change their possible solutions, how similar the issues are between fiction and reality, and how to enact possible change in the future, even on a smaller scale than improving an entire society or government.
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