Summary
One of the most pedagogically inspiring moments of my first semester student teaching was reading Deborah Appleman's Critical Encounters in Secondary English (2015), in which Appleman explores the benefits of introducing high school students to explicitly theoretical thought. Her ideas largely informed this inquiry and led to many of the curricular experiments analyzed here. When I began teaching a section of English III, I was excited to apply my working theory in my work with juniors, who are more experienced students and simply more cognitively developed people. This took the form of a "Critical Lenses unit" (which you can read in its entirety here), in which we read theoretical texts, introducing my students to feminist and Marxist interpretation, which we then applied to Charlotte Perkins-Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (as well as a number of other texts and images). In this artifact analysis page I analyze my introduction of theoretical texts and my students' work in applying these frameworks.
Introducing Theoretical Thinking
The first challenge I faced in implementing theoretical texts was simply introducing my students to the concept of critical theory and engaging in interpretation from a specific perspective. The struggle with conceptualizing this new type of reading, and indeed thinking, was a familiar one to me, as I had never encountered critical theory in high school and was cast adrift into Martin Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art" as a college freshman. I wanted my students' introduction to this new (and difficult!) type of thinking to be much gentler than mine, so I designed a lesson focused purely on conceptually understanding this new academic task. Inspired by Appleman's work, I used the metaphor of "critical lenses" in my introduction.
This metaphor (though a bit simplistic) proved accessible to my students. In my direct instruction of this concept, I began with the fact that the same text can mean different things to different people, based on our individual perspective. My students were ready to grant that we all approach art with different histories and cultural backgrounds, which make us notice different things and understand those things differently. With some gratuitous use of my own glasses as a prop, I explained how higher level analysis requires that we understand and interpret art from perspectives other than our own. I explained that these perspectives are types of "critical lenses" that we can "put on" in order to notice different things and interpret them in different ways.
This metaphor essentially prepared my students to think intentionally about the theoretical frameworks upon which they draw in interpreting text. The "critical lens" that students were "putting on" is essentially an interpretive schema--an examined system of associations, relationships, and values that informs their interpretation. Finally, to prime my students' first encounter with critical theory, I gave my students some examples of types of "lenses," and had students take notes on some of the key assumptions of the feminist lens, which they would be building by reading some feminist theory that night for homework: |
Clearly, this was a complex, demanding lesson, rather heavy on direct instruction and note taking. This was my primary concern in designing this lesson. I sought to prepare students and encourage buy-in by playing the "college card:" emphasizing the detail of "higher-level" analysis, explaining that this is what English classes will look like at the collegiate level. One of the key goals of this unit was pushing students toward college-level analysis and building the skills to express that analysis in writing, which was ultimately assessed with an analytical essay (approaching college-level length, prompt complexity, and independence in composition). Despite my fears regarding the complexity of the material and the amount of direct-instruction and note-taking in my lesson, my students took quickly to these new concepts and demonstrated an exciting level of engagement. My field notes reflecting on these lessons read as follow:
Notes (2/17): This went super well! They actually picked up the concept of critical lenses really quickly. It was the most engaged they had been so far this year. Took the notes well and applied the ideas to the concrete poem. We read about a page of Shakespeare’s Sister together, pausing to discuss and clarify. Great lesson!
Primed by this introduction to theoretical thinking, my students jumped into their first piece of critical theory: four pages I excerpted from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own: the section in which she discusses "Shakespeare's Sister." It was from this theoretical text that we constructed our feminist interpretive schema, thus serving as our "paired text" for our work with "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (and later The Great Gatsby). Click below to learn about subsequent lessons in this unit and to read my students' first forays into feminist criticism.