ms. ora meier
Project Abstract
This narrative inquiry considers how one teacher’s development of empathy (by choosing topics, texts and films that are personal to the teacher) helped students better connect to films and literature. The paper considers how parental influences and previous school experiences impact on teaching and syllabus choices. The paper also explores how a greater awareness of these influences and experiences combined with a desire to help students relate to literature with empathy can inspire more understanding and engaged students.
This narrative inquiry considers how one teacher’s development of empathy (by choosing topics, texts and films that are personal to the teacher) helped students better connect to films and literature. The paper considers how parental influences and previous school experiences impact on teaching and syllabus choices. The paper also explores how a greater awareness of these influences and experiences combined with a desire to help students relate to literature with empathy can inspire more understanding and engaged students.
Full Text
I didn’t watch much TV growing up in the Bayewitz house. My parents didn’t own a television until I turned 3, and (I’m told) my older siblings were forced to sign a contract that limited the number of shows that they could watch. Though I was too young to read, much less sign such a document, I do have one memory of my father single-handedly carrying in our first television set and placing it in our 80s den with the dusty couch. There must have been much enthusiasm around the purchase of the television. My parents had agreed to the purchase so that we could watch our home videos, and I’m sure it didn’t hurt that my dad enjoyed a weekly or bi-weekly sports show viewing to relax.
Television programs and, to a certain extent, films were considered a distraction and after viewing a segment, a lengthy discussion about the deeper moral values often ensued. Topics included the appropriateness of dress, the interactions between the friends and the level of respect that children were demonstrating to their parents. Typically, there were no movies or TV shows that fulfilled the standards of honesty, integrity and kindness that were expected in the Bayewitz home.
I developed a clearer understanding of my father’s television standards when he was dying from cancer and my parent’s basement (moved to Teaneck, NJ) was transformed into his hospital room; he watched episode after episode of The Honeymooners. Somehow the benign humor and old-style values were considered appropriate and could lift his spirit. My parent’s Netflix account was filled with Honeymooners requests and no film requests.
Which brings me to my current topic: How developing and selecting films for my Lit and Film class has brought me closer to my father and helped me to become a more honest teacher. He probably would never have enjoyed viewing the films in my course (I can almost hear him criticize the …). That being said, the topics that I have been drawn to and the characters that are portrayed on the silver screen in a timeless and engaging way, in many ways relate to one of the most honest, kind and thoughtful people that I have ever known.
My Literature and Film course is a course that is designed to engage students with the art of storytelling, both through written words and the art of cinematography. The course description introduces the course by focusing on interpretation and the magic of both creative forms:
Providing comic, romantic, surreal or horrific views on a story, film screenwriters and directors can reinterpret a text in ways that challenge or redeem the original story. The art of adaptation and the question of how a story can and should be recreated and retold on the silver screen will be a focus of this course. Students will examine which film and storytelling techniques are employed to explore personal and communal challenges in shorts, feature films and documentaries. Students will also study screenwriting and compose original screenplays for particular scenes.
Over the past seven years of teaching the course, I read countless numbers of short and longer texts and viewed related films. My guiding principle in preparing the final syllabus had always been identifying texts that were short enough for the jaded seniors to read and choosing films that had cinematic elements worth interpreting. My belief was that there was no salient thematic link to these selections. Though each paper and presentation required students to articulate a central guiding thesis for each individual work, I was not attempting to introduce a comprehensive thematic study for the year.
And yet, something clicked a few months ago about an underlying inspiration or driving theme for my course that I may have had all along. Whether it was the moral questions, the parent-child relationships, the commitment to family values, the personal challenges that characters had to overcome, my dad seemed to be present in every film. Or, perhaps it was just my teaching two Jimmy Stewart films (Rear Window and Vertigo) for the first time this year. My father’s blue eyes, fair hair and tall, slim build resembled this old-time Hollywood heartthrob. This epiphany and new awareness of the link between my life experiences and the way that I select texts inspired me to reexamine the way that students can become more invested in art and literature.
Perhaps it’s just that I see him in everything that I read and in many of my day-to-day choices. Indeed, my oldest two children are named after my dad, and I’d probably name every child after him if it were solely up to me. But, I also believe this tendency to draw personal connections benefits my teaching practice.
This narrative inquiry considers how one teacher’s development of empathy (by choosing topics, texts and films that are personal to the teacher) can help kids better connect to films and literature.
Introductory Unit 2013: Everything Is Illuminated and “The Very Rigid Search”
The guiding question of the Everything Is Illuminated unit relates to reliability. Rather than accept everything that the short story’s narrator, Alex, says at face value, students closely examine the text to identify any inherent contradictions in Alex’s accounts of himself, his grandfather and/or Jonathan (another main character and the driving force behind “The Very Rigid Search”).
For one of my first lessons this past year, students worked with a partner to identify at least three moments or scenes that exemplify Alex’s relationship with his grandfather or with Jonathan. Students were instructed to focus on key words, symbols and/or noteworthy behaviors that are highlighted during interactions or conversations in the story. They were required to include how the relationship changes from the beginning to the end of the short study.
After developing a firm grounding in the story and an answer to the reliability question, the class applied their literary analysis to begin asking questions that related to filmmaking. The guiding question for this second part of the lesson was: How would you utilize visual, aural or production film techniques to convey essential elements of these characters? Students were actually challenged to discuss how they would direct one of the key story moments that they had selected.
My favorite part of this lesson was when we went around the room and each group presented their chosen scene and adaptation ideas. Class sharing as a culminating activity is often a strategy that I use to both motivate the students to maximize class work periods, as well as provide an opportunity for students to learn from each other.
Jonathan’s motivation to visit Ukraine relates to the timeless desire to understand one’s past in order to come to terms with the present. In Jonathan’s case, he is obsessively concerned with saving objects and mementos so that the past will not be forgotten. In one early scene, Jonathan places his grandmother’s dentures in a zip-lock bag; while another close-up is on a molding sandwich. The film begins and ends in a cemetery, and the film seems to consider how the living should best relate to their past and lost relatives.
As I sit writing on my father’s desk (which I inherited when my mother moved out of my parents’ home), I know that I still don’t have a conclusive answer to this question:
Should I be more like my mother who saved so many letters, school projects and family photographs that the floor of her basement and at least two bedrooms were covered with these “treasures” (as she called them)? It took my mom months and months to prepare her house to be put on the real estate market. And, on moving day, she filled storage space in a warehouse with the “treasures” that she had yet to examine.
I am hardly suggesting that my mother is a Jonathan-character. When I watch this film, I am reminded that I’m still unsure about my mother’s collecting motivations, and I know that this is a topic that is too confrontational to raise with her. When I watch this film, I am reminded that I don’t have my father to ask about my mother’s motivations. He is no longer around to poke fun at her commitment to saving books in foreign languages that she can no longer understand; her link to her college-self.
Now that I have a clearer understanding of underlying or subconscious motivations for creating this unit, I’m even more convinced that revealing and sharing these aspects of my personal life would be inappropriate. While I am blessed to have a fair number of happy memories with my father, the actual link that I feel related to Everything is Illuminated is loss, absence and grief. Thankfully, most seniors will not necessarily relate to these experiences, and I hardly think that my role as a teacher is to scare them. Rather than invite discourse and engagement with the text, opening up about my struggles encountering loss would likely steer the conversation away from the essential themes and skills of the unit.
In part due to this realization, I have chosen Shoeless Joe as my summer reading for the summer of 2014. As I explain in more detail below, I anticipate that this text will afford more opportunities for me to be open about personal connections that are less threatening. My hope and anticipation is that this novel also has layers that high school seniors can relate to. Thus, through our shared discourse about Shoeless Joe, I will strive to begin the year with a more empathetic and open classroom.
Second Semester: Individual Projects
My willingness to accept that I was choosing texts and films that (in some way) linked to my past didn’t necessarily help me determine how I could use this knowledge to better connect with my students or help them more effectively relate to literature. That being said, I did recognize that the students needed more opportunities to make personal choices in order to demonstrate individual strengths and interests.
While I generally try to incorporate individual interests and provide students with the opportunity to make creative choices while completing assignments, the second semester of my Literature and Film class was project-based and designed to hone a particular film-related expertise.
The first major project in the second semester was the February Adaptation Project/Paper. In response to the common classroom suggestions and ideas of films to view and analyze, I required that students apply their knowledge and skills from the first semester and develop a comprehensive argument about a specific adaptation. Students could choose to study a literature-to-feature film adaptation or a true event-to-feature film adaptation. The literary text could be a short story, novella, novel or fairy tale that has been adapted into one or two different films. The true story or event must have been documented in the form of newspaper articles, interviews, or through another text. In both cases, students chose a topic and developed a unique thesis about that topic evaluating each adaptation. Students were required to develop criteria as per what is means to create a “successful” adaptation as part of composing their argument. In addition to having topic and genre choices, students also decided on their assessment structure. Students either prepared a class presentation that included a 1-2 page handout or composed a 3-4 page paper.
For the final project of the year, students opted to work as a screenwriter, director or storyboard artist. I set-up a variety of options so that students were able to choose which approach was most relevant to them and which creative mode would be most inspiring and engaging. Everyone adapted from Etgar Keret’s short story, “Healthy Start” for the project.
Students had the creative license to change the original stories in any way that appealed to them as the screenwriter, storyboard artist or director. Though the final project was an individual assignment (and they were graded separately), there were some class periods devoted to workshop their ideas in small groups (and thereby utilize the expertise of their classmates).
By providing students with clear expectations and with the space to be creative within their specialty areas, I received the strongest and most interesting work of the year. Students who had been consistently late submitting essays throughout the year and never sought my direction or instruction were excited to discuss their works-in-progress and asked meaningful clarifying questions. All the final projects exceeded my expectations, and, on the last day of class, the students seemed to enjoy discussing their creative process and their products together.
While I am proud of this culminating unit, I am also acutely aware of the teaching and learning that created the framework for this success. Even in the cases of students who were less engaged in writing film criticism and analysis, they were still members of my class and learned the crucial tools of filmmaking. I cannot use the success of my final unit as an indication that I should shift to an exclusively project-based classroom. Instead, I am reconsidering how my instruction related to film analysis and the art of filmmaking can become more empathetic. As I mentioned earlier, this goal of empathy inspired my selection of Shoeless Joe as the summer reading.
Which leads me to my greatest personal challenge of the Lit and Film course to date: How will I emotionally prepare myself to teach Ray Kinsella’s novel, Shoeless Joe? At the core, the novel combines memory and fantasy to help the protagonist (Ray) come to terms with his father’s death and the unfinished regrets that he still experiences. (Isn’t this the age-old experience of anyone who has lost a parent at a young age?)
In my first year teaching the course (back in 2007), students read the original “Shoeless Joe” short story as part of a short stories unit. I experienced a lot of difficulty watching the Field of Dreams adaptation in class. In particular, when Ray gets to play catch with his dad on the field, I exercised tremendous self-restraint to prevent myself from breaking down in class. And then I steered clear of anything to do with parental death for five years. At the time, I was convinced that mentioning anything personal in class would be highly inappropriate for the students and uncomfortable for me.
But something changed for me this past year that inspired me to reconsider Field of Dreams and actually reread the complete Shoeless Joe novel. I had become increasingly interested in teaching novel-to-film adaptations, in place of short story/novella-to-film adaptations, and I was willing to reconsider Kinsella’s book if it could be an appropriate fit.
What I soon realized was that the emotional father/son reunion in the film barely scratched the surface of the deeper struggles and memories that inspires Kinsella’s journey in the novel.
In Ray’s case, he is a struggling farmer who carves a baseball field in his Iowa farm backyard, as a response to a mysterious voice that declares, “If you build it, he will come.” Through the course of his travels to make sense of this command, Ray kidnaps author J.D. Salinger and brings him to a baseball game. Though Salinger hadn’t published anything since 1965, a long-forgotten interview with the author suggests to Kinsella that attending a baseball game is unfinished business for Salinger.
The game is only the beginning of a friendship that inspires Salinger to see the mysterious baseball field for himself – and thereby realize that he has another story to write. In a way, by developing an honest friendship (and the empathy that goes along with it), Ray is able to become more open about his past and his desire to reconnect with his family members.
My summer letter asks students to consider why it is J.D. Salinger (in particular) who Kinsella needs to kidnap. The junior year summer reading is Catcher in the Rye, so I’m hopeful that students will have insight on this topic. And, on a personal level, I wonder what an author (famous or not) can offer about coming to terms with the past, especially an author who has cut himself off from writing completely. Perhaps this secondary question is really the central one, as it is an outgrowth of my professional development study:
By helping students capitalize on their personal experiences, can I inspire a deeper engagement with literature in my classroom? Can a real and honest relationship with an author (or the characters that she has invented) help the students become more insightful and thoughtful readers and writers? Or, more importantly, can this relationship help the students become more engaged and connected individuals in their daily lives?
As a high school student, I had a string of teachers who talked too much about their personal lives – and not enough about the subject matter. Thinking back to my high school persona, I was repeatedly frustrated by this misdirected openness.
Now, after this narrative inquiry experience, I wonder if I was misguided in completely cutting off this invitation to openness. I wonder how I may use my summer reading preparation for Lit and Film to reconsider opportunities for sharing my life to enhance the study of literature. Largely because of this narrative inquiry process, I am eager to reread Shoeless Joe with a genuine focus on empathy and using the book to create a more open and collaborative environment. My plan is to be transparent about this goal, and I look forward to tracking and reflecting on my students’ responses to this transparency. On the most basic level, I believe that this approach will inspire students to become more invested in the class because the lessons will more explicitly relate to them. My hope is that by making a shared classroom culture and by promoting individual thoughtfulness and awareness, students will become better readers of literature and of life.
Television programs and, to a certain extent, films were considered a distraction and after viewing a segment, a lengthy discussion about the deeper moral values often ensued. Topics included the appropriateness of dress, the interactions between the friends and the level of respect that children were demonstrating to their parents. Typically, there were no movies or TV shows that fulfilled the standards of honesty, integrity and kindness that were expected in the Bayewitz home.
I developed a clearer understanding of my father’s television standards when he was dying from cancer and my parent’s basement (moved to Teaneck, NJ) was transformed into his hospital room; he watched episode after episode of The Honeymooners. Somehow the benign humor and old-style values were considered appropriate and could lift his spirit. My parent’s Netflix account was filled with Honeymooners requests and no film requests.
Which brings me to my current topic: How developing and selecting films for my Lit and Film class has brought me closer to my father and helped me to become a more honest teacher. He probably would never have enjoyed viewing the films in my course (I can almost hear him criticize the …). That being said, the topics that I have been drawn to and the characters that are portrayed on the silver screen in a timeless and engaging way, in many ways relate to one of the most honest, kind and thoughtful people that I have ever known.
My Literature and Film course is a course that is designed to engage students with the art of storytelling, both through written words and the art of cinematography. The course description introduces the course by focusing on interpretation and the magic of both creative forms:
Providing comic, romantic, surreal or horrific views on a story, film screenwriters and directors can reinterpret a text in ways that challenge or redeem the original story. The art of adaptation and the question of how a story can and should be recreated and retold on the silver screen will be a focus of this course. Students will examine which film and storytelling techniques are employed to explore personal and communal challenges in shorts, feature films and documentaries. Students will also study screenwriting and compose original screenplays for particular scenes.
Over the past seven years of teaching the course, I read countless numbers of short and longer texts and viewed related films. My guiding principle in preparing the final syllabus had always been identifying texts that were short enough for the jaded seniors to read and choosing films that had cinematic elements worth interpreting. My belief was that there was no salient thematic link to these selections. Though each paper and presentation required students to articulate a central guiding thesis for each individual work, I was not attempting to introduce a comprehensive thematic study for the year.
And yet, something clicked a few months ago about an underlying inspiration or driving theme for my course that I may have had all along. Whether it was the moral questions, the parent-child relationships, the commitment to family values, the personal challenges that characters had to overcome, my dad seemed to be present in every film. Or, perhaps it was just my teaching two Jimmy Stewart films (Rear Window and Vertigo) for the first time this year. My father’s blue eyes, fair hair and tall, slim build resembled this old-time Hollywood heartthrob. This epiphany and new awareness of the link between my life experiences and the way that I select texts inspired me to reexamine the way that students can become more invested in art and literature.
Perhaps it’s just that I see him in everything that I read and in many of my day-to-day choices. Indeed, my oldest two children are named after my dad, and I’d probably name every child after him if it were solely up to me. But, I also believe this tendency to draw personal connections benefits my teaching practice.
This narrative inquiry considers how one teacher’s development of empathy (by choosing topics, texts and films that are personal to the teacher) can help kids better connect to films and literature.
Introductory Unit 2013: Everything Is Illuminated and “The Very Rigid Search”
The guiding question of the Everything Is Illuminated unit relates to reliability. Rather than accept everything that the short story’s narrator, Alex, says at face value, students closely examine the text to identify any inherent contradictions in Alex’s accounts of himself, his grandfather and/or Jonathan (another main character and the driving force behind “The Very Rigid Search”).
For one of my first lessons this past year, students worked with a partner to identify at least three moments or scenes that exemplify Alex’s relationship with his grandfather or with Jonathan. Students were instructed to focus on key words, symbols and/or noteworthy behaviors that are highlighted during interactions or conversations in the story. They were required to include how the relationship changes from the beginning to the end of the short study.
After developing a firm grounding in the story and an answer to the reliability question, the class applied their literary analysis to begin asking questions that related to filmmaking. The guiding question for this second part of the lesson was: How would you utilize visual, aural or production film techniques to convey essential elements of these characters? Students were actually challenged to discuss how they would direct one of the key story moments that they had selected.
My favorite part of this lesson was when we went around the room and each group presented their chosen scene and adaptation ideas. Class sharing as a culminating activity is often a strategy that I use to both motivate the students to maximize class work periods, as well as provide an opportunity for students to learn from each other.
Jonathan’s motivation to visit Ukraine relates to the timeless desire to understand one’s past in order to come to terms with the present. In Jonathan’s case, he is obsessively concerned with saving objects and mementos so that the past will not be forgotten. In one early scene, Jonathan places his grandmother’s dentures in a zip-lock bag; while another close-up is on a molding sandwich. The film begins and ends in a cemetery, and the film seems to consider how the living should best relate to their past and lost relatives.
As I sit writing on my father’s desk (which I inherited when my mother moved out of my parents’ home), I know that I still don’t have a conclusive answer to this question:
Should I be more like my mother who saved so many letters, school projects and family photographs that the floor of her basement and at least two bedrooms were covered with these “treasures” (as she called them)? It took my mom months and months to prepare her house to be put on the real estate market. And, on moving day, she filled storage space in a warehouse with the “treasures” that she had yet to examine.
I am hardly suggesting that my mother is a Jonathan-character. When I watch this film, I am reminded that I’m still unsure about my mother’s collecting motivations, and I know that this is a topic that is too confrontational to raise with her. When I watch this film, I am reminded that I don’t have my father to ask about my mother’s motivations. He is no longer around to poke fun at her commitment to saving books in foreign languages that she can no longer understand; her link to her college-self.
Now that I have a clearer understanding of underlying or subconscious motivations for creating this unit, I’m even more convinced that revealing and sharing these aspects of my personal life would be inappropriate. While I am blessed to have a fair number of happy memories with my father, the actual link that I feel related to Everything is Illuminated is loss, absence and grief. Thankfully, most seniors will not necessarily relate to these experiences, and I hardly think that my role as a teacher is to scare them. Rather than invite discourse and engagement with the text, opening up about my struggles encountering loss would likely steer the conversation away from the essential themes and skills of the unit.
In part due to this realization, I have chosen Shoeless Joe as my summer reading for the summer of 2014. As I explain in more detail below, I anticipate that this text will afford more opportunities for me to be open about personal connections that are less threatening. My hope and anticipation is that this novel also has layers that high school seniors can relate to. Thus, through our shared discourse about Shoeless Joe, I will strive to begin the year with a more empathetic and open classroom.
Second Semester: Individual Projects
My willingness to accept that I was choosing texts and films that (in some way) linked to my past didn’t necessarily help me determine how I could use this knowledge to better connect with my students or help them more effectively relate to literature. That being said, I did recognize that the students needed more opportunities to make personal choices in order to demonstrate individual strengths and interests.
While I generally try to incorporate individual interests and provide students with the opportunity to make creative choices while completing assignments, the second semester of my Literature and Film class was project-based and designed to hone a particular film-related expertise.
The first major project in the second semester was the February Adaptation Project/Paper. In response to the common classroom suggestions and ideas of films to view and analyze, I required that students apply their knowledge and skills from the first semester and develop a comprehensive argument about a specific adaptation. Students could choose to study a literature-to-feature film adaptation or a true event-to-feature film adaptation. The literary text could be a short story, novella, novel or fairy tale that has been adapted into one or two different films. The true story or event must have been documented in the form of newspaper articles, interviews, or through another text. In both cases, students chose a topic and developed a unique thesis about that topic evaluating each adaptation. Students were required to develop criteria as per what is means to create a “successful” adaptation as part of composing their argument. In addition to having topic and genre choices, students also decided on their assessment structure. Students either prepared a class presentation that included a 1-2 page handout or composed a 3-4 page paper.
For the final project of the year, students opted to work as a screenwriter, director or storyboard artist. I set-up a variety of options so that students were able to choose which approach was most relevant to them and which creative mode would be most inspiring and engaging. Everyone adapted from Etgar Keret’s short story, “Healthy Start” for the project.
Students had the creative license to change the original stories in any way that appealed to them as the screenwriter, storyboard artist or director. Though the final project was an individual assignment (and they were graded separately), there were some class periods devoted to workshop their ideas in small groups (and thereby utilize the expertise of their classmates).
By providing students with clear expectations and with the space to be creative within their specialty areas, I received the strongest and most interesting work of the year. Students who had been consistently late submitting essays throughout the year and never sought my direction or instruction were excited to discuss their works-in-progress and asked meaningful clarifying questions. All the final projects exceeded my expectations, and, on the last day of class, the students seemed to enjoy discussing their creative process and their products together.
While I am proud of this culminating unit, I am also acutely aware of the teaching and learning that created the framework for this success. Even in the cases of students who were less engaged in writing film criticism and analysis, they were still members of my class and learned the crucial tools of filmmaking. I cannot use the success of my final unit as an indication that I should shift to an exclusively project-based classroom. Instead, I am reconsidering how my instruction related to film analysis and the art of filmmaking can become more empathetic. As I mentioned earlier, this goal of empathy inspired my selection of Shoeless Joe as the summer reading.
Which leads me to my greatest personal challenge of the Lit and Film course to date: How will I emotionally prepare myself to teach Ray Kinsella’s novel, Shoeless Joe? At the core, the novel combines memory and fantasy to help the protagonist (Ray) come to terms with his father’s death and the unfinished regrets that he still experiences. (Isn’t this the age-old experience of anyone who has lost a parent at a young age?)
In my first year teaching the course (back in 2007), students read the original “Shoeless Joe” short story as part of a short stories unit. I experienced a lot of difficulty watching the Field of Dreams adaptation in class. In particular, when Ray gets to play catch with his dad on the field, I exercised tremendous self-restraint to prevent myself from breaking down in class. And then I steered clear of anything to do with parental death for five years. At the time, I was convinced that mentioning anything personal in class would be highly inappropriate for the students and uncomfortable for me.
But something changed for me this past year that inspired me to reconsider Field of Dreams and actually reread the complete Shoeless Joe novel. I had become increasingly interested in teaching novel-to-film adaptations, in place of short story/novella-to-film adaptations, and I was willing to reconsider Kinsella’s book if it could be an appropriate fit.
What I soon realized was that the emotional father/son reunion in the film barely scratched the surface of the deeper struggles and memories that inspires Kinsella’s journey in the novel.
In Ray’s case, he is a struggling farmer who carves a baseball field in his Iowa farm backyard, as a response to a mysterious voice that declares, “If you build it, he will come.” Through the course of his travels to make sense of this command, Ray kidnaps author J.D. Salinger and brings him to a baseball game. Though Salinger hadn’t published anything since 1965, a long-forgotten interview with the author suggests to Kinsella that attending a baseball game is unfinished business for Salinger.
The game is only the beginning of a friendship that inspires Salinger to see the mysterious baseball field for himself – and thereby realize that he has another story to write. In a way, by developing an honest friendship (and the empathy that goes along with it), Ray is able to become more open about his past and his desire to reconnect with his family members.
My summer letter asks students to consider why it is J.D. Salinger (in particular) who Kinsella needs to kidnap. The junior year summer reading is Catcher in the Rye, so I’m hopeful that students will have insight on this topic. And, on a personal level, I wonder what an author (famous or not) can offer about coming to terms with the past, especially an author who has cut himself off from writing completely. Perhaps this secondary question is really the central one, as it is an outgrowth of my professional development study:
By helping students capitalize on their personal experiences, can I inspire a deeper engagement with literature in my classroom? Can a real and honest relationship with an author (or the characters that she has invented) help the students become more insightful and thoughtful readers and writers? Or, more importantly, can this relationship help the students become more engaged and connected individuals in their daily lives?
As a high school student, I had a string of teachers who talked too much about their personal lives – and not enough about the subject matter. Thinking back to my high school persona, I was repeatedly frustrated by this misdirected openness.
Now, after this narrative inquiry experience, I wonder if I was misguided in completely cutting off this invitation to openness. I wonder how I may use my summer reading preparation for Lit and Film to reconsider opportunities for sharing my life to enhance the study of literature. Largely because of this narrative inquiry process, I am eager to reread Shoeless Joe with a genuine focus on empathy and using the book to create a more open and collaborative environment. My plan is to be transparent about this goal, and I look forward to tracking and reflecting on my students’ responses to this transparency. On the most basic level, I believe that this approach will inspire students to become more invested in the class because the lessons will more explicitly relate to them. My hope is that by making a shared classroom culture and by promoting individual thoughtfulness and awareness, students will become better readers of literature and of life.