A Whole New Problem

I have been working with a friend to put together a technology project for our 8th grade class. My school has single gender classes and we are working on a humanities topic for the boys. We are lucky enough to live in a large city with wonderful theater. The boys will go to Steppenwolf Theater this week to view their production of A Separate Peace and will be also completing a novel study of the same book. We decided to use this opportunity to introduce the idea of contributing to wikis . They have used wikis in the past, but primarily as a web page/textbook type resource for tech class in the 6th grade.

The challenge that we wanted the boys to accomplish was to talk/write about their experience with the book, focusing primarily on critical analysis and deeper thinking. We determined to create a lit circle based concept with 3 teams of 5 boys each. Each team would distribute the 5 roles and be responsible for covering a total of 4 chapters each. Those roles are partially based on the traditional roles of Harvey Daniels and partially modified to accomplish some tech goals of visual literacy . I realized in trying to determine some of the roles that a great likelihood existed that some of the boys ( maybe most, for all I know) will go to the Internet ( Wikipedia, Bookrags, Sparksnotes and the like) for a quick and easy overview of the book,its characters, themes, and even test questions before they even open a page of the book. In their perfect world, they would be able to respond without actually reading the novel itself. They are well aware that with a little bit of their time and very little effort, it is possible to get an overview of all that content that is usually covered in writing assignments and class discussions. These possibilities present a good argument for trying to teach more contemporary books that do not have so much material available on the web to "borrow" or read in lieu of a book. However, these possibilities also provide an opportunity for the instructors to create and demand more inventive ways of being held accountable for reading material and providing interpretation.

I am looking forward to having a discussion tomorrow about how to accomplish the goals mentioned above. I am going to assign one role as a Graphic Interpreter and hold that student accountable for finding an image to capture an idea or theme from the chapter, making sure to cite the artist who created it as well as the source. I am going to use this opportunity to talk about Creative Commons and copyright protections. Instead of the role of summarizer and theme, I have decided to try to create a set of more "essential" type questions that will require using real life examples or discussions of ideas such as heroism, healthy competition, war, and lies. Each student will need to respond to the events of the chapter as one of the characters in the book who are responding to what they see they narrator do or hear him say.

I am hoping this will be an excellent adventure- or at least, an excellent exercise in trying to get the students to think for themselves.