Increasing Perceived Relevance Through Current Events
This lesson from early November largely inspired the earliest thoughts that later became this thesis. Originally the subject of a blog post in November, click here for my initial reflection on this lesson.
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card is largely sold and read as a young-adult novel, but in fact deals with some weighty ethical issues surrounding governance and individual rights. My classroom mentor employs this text as the first novel of freshman year for its combination of accessible language, high-interest subject matter, and presentation of these complex ethical questions.
Unfortunately, in my teaching of the novel, I encountered difficulty in pushing my 9th graders into the problem space of these ethical questions. Much of the class was not used to struggling with text in this way, and, as a result, our discussion was largely mired in the reading comprehension register of the text. This is a perfect example of the flattening of the text described in "The Problem," above. By simply accepting the text as a two-dimensional narrative, students were effectively ceding all intellectual agency to the text--they were unable to see, much less dispute ideas informing and underlying the presented story.
One of the major ethical dilemmas presented by this novel is the use of child soldiers. The protagonist, Ender, is taken from his family at the age of six and trained to become a starfleet commander. Selected for his exceptional intellectual potential, humanity must use him to exterminate an alien race in order to save humanity. Even this two-sentence synopsis is rife with ethical quandaries, but my students were too wrapped up in protagonist bias--blindly rooting for Ender throughout the zero-gravity space battles--to really challenge the precepts underlying the plot.
I sought to add depth to this text by having students read this article on the lives of child soldiers used in various conflicts around the world. This problematized the text and invigorated class discussion by isolating a theme and establishing a shared experience among the class to inform interpretation. This established connection to the real world imbued the text with new associations and human value. The underlying precepts of the plot, previously invisible, now became a source of dissonance. Students felt the ethical issues beneath the plot. With these problems isolated, students could apply an interpretive framework furnished by our shared experience with this article by looking at the two texts together. This structured interpretation proved a conduit to richer and more lively class discussion, dealing with big contentious questions like "Could there be a conflict in which the use of child soldiers is justified?"
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card is largely sold and read as a young-adult novel, but in fact deals with some weighty ethical issues surrounding governance and individual rights. My classroom mentor employs this text as the first novel of freshman year for its combination of accessible language, high-interest subject matter, and presentation of these complex ethical questions.
Unfortunately, in my teaching of the novel, I encountered difficulty in pushing my 9th graders into the problem space of these ethical questions. Much of the class was not used to struggling with text in this way, and, as a result, our discussion was largely mired in the reading comprehension register of the text. This is a perfect example of the flattening of the text described in "The Problem," above. By simply accepting the text as a two-dimensional narrative, students were effectively ceding all intellectual agency to the text--they were unable to see, much less dispute ideas informing and underlying the presented story.
One of the major ethical dilemmas presented by this novel is the use of child soldiers. The protagonist, Ender, is taken from his family at the age of six and trained to become a starfleet commander. Selected for his exceptional intellectual potential, humanity must use him to exterminate an alien race in order to save humanity. Even this two-sentence synopsis is rife with ethical quandaries, but my students were too wrapped up in protagonist bias--blindly rooting for Ender throughout the zero-gravity space battles--to really challenge the precepts underlying the plot.
I sought to add depth to this text by having students read this article on the lives of child soldiers used in various conflicts around the world. This problematized the text and invigorated class discussion by isolating a theme and establishing a shared experience among the class to inform interpretation. This established connection to the real world imbued the text with new associations and human value. The underlying precepts of the plot, previously invisible, now became a source of dissonance. Students felt the ethical issues beneath the plot. With these problems isolated, students could apply an interpretive framework furnished by our shared experience with this article by looking at the two texts together. This structured interpretation proved a conduit to richer and more lively class discussion, dealing with big contentious questions like "Could there be a conflict in which the use of child soldiers is justified?"
Connections and Conclusions
This lesson achieved the first two goals of the framework outlined in "A Proposed Solution:"
- Pairing the ethical problem of child soldiers within Ender's Game with a real-world parallel provided an additional perspective, adding depth to student understanding of a rich ethical issue underlying the text.
- Contrasting these two thematically similar accounts problematized students' understanding of Ender's Game. Looking at the texts together structured the act of interpretation for students and led to higher quality, more nuanced analysis.
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