Throughout my student teaching placement, I have been experimenting with pairing texts that share common themes in order to practice interpretive skills, to problematize interpretations by providing alternate perspectives, and to stimulate interest. My junior class has proven especially fruitful for this; I’ve been designing units that introduce the class to various critical lenses, which we then apply by interpreting text.
The first unit I designed with this model acquainted the class with feminist criticism, which they then applied in their reading of Charlotte Perkins-Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” This was a very rich unit in terms of analyzing paired texts: I introduced feminist criticism through a theoretical text (an excerpt from A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf). I then offered some historical and biographical details through an article later written by Perkins-Gilman, entitled “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper.’”
The first unit I designed with this model acquainted the class with feminist criticism, which they then applied in their reading of Charlotte Perkins-Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” This was a very rich unit in terms of analyzing paired texts: I introduced feminist criticism through a theoretical text (an excerpt from A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf). I then offered some historical and biographical details through an article later written by Perkins-Gilman, entitled “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper.’”