Statistical Analysis
Study 3: Role of physical fitness and fundamental movements on body posture
Now that we have described the planning model, we can apply that model to designing units. In designing units you are going beyond planning for individual activities to organize your activities according to some coherent, overall topic, theme, issue, genre, archetypes, historical/literary period, or production. During your student teaching, you may be employing a number of different units lasting from a couple of days to several weeks. It is important to prepare these units in advance of student teaching when you have the time to conduct research and pull together relevant resources. You can also discuss units with your cooperating teachers in terms of how they are integrated into that teacher’s curriculum. (See Curriculum resources and Sample course syllabi, units, lesson plans, and activities on the website).
Different Organizational Structures for Units
You first need to define a central focus around which you organize your specific daily activities in terms of a topic, theme, issue, genre, production/writing, archetype, literary period. There are advantages and disadvantages to these optional structures to consider in selecting your central focus. In many cases, units combine different aspects of these alternatives; there is no pure prototypical example for each of these different approaches.
Topics
Organizing your unit around a topic such as power, evil, suburbia, the family, etc., means that you are finding texts that portray these different topics. For example, you may select a series of texts that portray mother/daughter relationships, as in The Bean 54 WHAT LITERATURES ARE WE TEACHING?
Trees (Kingsolver, 1998) or A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (Dorris, 1987). Students may then compare or contrast the different portrayals of the same topic across different texts.
It is important to select topics about which students have some familiarity or interest, or that may engage them. You may also want to have students study how certain topics are represented in literature and/or the media. For example, students may examine how the family is represented in nineteenth-century literature compared to twentieth-century representations. Or, how the rural, small-town social worlds are represented in twentieth-century American literature.
One advantage of a topics approach is that topics do not imply the kind of value or cultural orientation associated with a thematic or issue unit. Students may construct their own value stance related to a topic, for example, defining different attitudes towards the topic of mother/daughter relationships. However, without that additional value orientation, students may lack motivation to be engaged in a topic.
Themes
You may also organize your unit around certain themes portrayed in texts. A frequently used theme is that of individualism or conformity to society—the extent to which characters must conform to or resist societal norms. As we just noted, one advantage of thematic units is that students may become engaged with related attitudes or values associated with a theme. One disadvantage of thematic units is that they can readily become too didactic, in which you attempt to have students “learn” certain thematic lessons—the importance of not conforming to society or the need to be courageous.
This problem of didacticism relates to how you organize your unit. You can organize your unit in both a “top-down” deductive manner, providing students with theoretical perspectives or frames for them to apply in a deductive manner. You can also organize your unit in a “bottom-up” inductive manner, encouraging students to make their own connections and applications. To avoid the didactic tendency of a thematic unit, you can move more to an inductive approach, allowing students to make their own interpretations and connections that may differ from any presupposed central thematic focus. (See Thematic literature instruction on the website).
Issues
You can also organize your units by issues, for example, the issue of gender and power—
the degree to which women may have to assume subordinate roles in a culture. One advantage of using an issue is that students may adopt different, competing perspectives about an issue, tensions that may create interest in that issue. One disadvantage of studying issues is that students may bring often rigidly defined stances on issues such as gun control or school vouchers, which may not allow for further development or consideration of alternative perspectives.
You may have students identify their own issues portrayed in a text. For example, students may identify the issue of social pressure from peers to adopt certain practices valued by the group, but perceived as problematic by certain group members.
Genres
You may also organize your unit around studying a particular genre—short story, novel, ballad, rap, drama, memoir, biography, poetry, film noir, or hybrid combinations or
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mixtures of genres evident in a multi-genre approach to writing instruction (Romano, 2000). (For discussion of genres in film/television, see Chapter 6). In studying a particular genre, students examine similar features of that genre in terms of prototypical settings, characters, storylines, and themes, as well as shared literary techniques.
One advantage of a genre approach is that students learn a larger literacy practice of making generalizations about similarities between different texts based on certain genre features. For example, having read a number of different autobiographical essays, students may then identify similar features common to those essays. One disadvantage of a genre approach is that it leads readily into pigeonholing or categorizing texts as representing certain genre features without critically analyzing those texts. Moreover, such reductionist genre approaches can also reify a formalist approach to English instruction—over-emphasizing the study of formal structures without examining other aspects of texts. For example, it may be assumed that all short stories have “rising action,”
“conflict,” and “resolution,” when in fact there are many stories that do not follow that formal structure.
Archetypes
You can also organize units around mythic or literacy archetypes, drawing on the critical approach of the archetypal approach discussed in Chapters 8 and 9. For example, you may organize a unit around the archetype of the romance quest narrative pattern evident in epic and medieval texts, as well as contemporary journey or travel quests of the Star Wars and Fellowship of the Rings series. As part of this unit, you may focus on the initial initiation of the hero in preparation for the quest, linking the hero’s initiation to adolescents’ own experiences of initiation in their own lives.
One advantage of archetypal approaches is that students may enjoy studying what are larger mythic aspects underlying a range of different texts associated with their own lives, if, for example, they understand that initiation rites as portrayed in literature also pervade their own experiences. One disadvantage of archetypal units is that they may lead to the same pigeonholing as with genre units. Moreover, unless students are familiar with a lot of literature, they may not be able to make generalizations about certain archetypical patterns in that literature.
Literary Periods
You may also create units based on certain literary periods, for example, the Romantic or Victorian period in British literature or the Harlem Renaissance in American literature.
In studying these periods, you can incorporate background historical events or cultural attitudes shaping texts, as well as similarities between literature, art, music, and popular media. For example, Coleridge’s and Byron’s artwork reflect much of the spiritual and political romantic perspectives found in their poetry. One advantage of such units is that you can study writers’ work as shaped by their historical and cultural contexts. One disadvantage is that it may simply become a matter of covering a lot of historical information or facts about features of the period without fostering critical response to the literature itself.
Historical/Regional/Cultural Worlds
You may also organize units around certain historical, regional, or cultural worlds, for example, the short story literature of the American South—stories by William Faulkner, 56 WHAT LITERATURES ARE WE TEACHING?
Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Reynolds Price, Bobbie Joe Mason, and others whose stories portrayed the world of the “Old South” and “New South.” Or, you could organize a unit around the historical period of Puritan America based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories and The Crucible (Miller, 2003).
Designing Units
Initial Interest Rousers
In designing units, you need to begin with an interest rouser activity that hooks students into the topic, issue, theme, genre, etc. By initially engaging them with texts, material, or phenomena you will be studying, you are providing them with an experience that enhances their interest and leads them to perceive the value or worth of the unit. For example, in doing a poetry unit, rather than beginning with a discussion of “what is poetry,” students may begin by bringing in and sharing favorite poems.
Providing Variety/Choice
In planning your unit, you also want to include a variety of different types of experiences in order to avoid redundancy and repetition. You can create variety by incorporating a range of different tools discussed throughout the book: drama, videos/DVDs, different forms of discussion, art work, creative writing, hypermedia, etc. You may also build in choices between the use of these different tools; again, students are more likely to be motivated to participate when they are given options. For example, rather than writing a final report, students may have the option of creating a hypermedia production.
You may also consider organizing your unit as a webquest, putting the tasks and related resources/links on a website using a wiki, blog, or Google Pages in which students complete a series of inquiry-based tasks (See Developing/designing literature webquests on the website). In creating webquests, it is important to move beyond worksheet tasks to foster students’ open-ended interpretations of texts.
Final Projects
Unit activities can lead up to a culminating final project that serves to draw together the different, disparate elements of the unit. This final project should provide students with an opportunity to extend approaches and ideas from the unit to create their own interpretations of texts. For example, in a unit on gender and power, students could analyze the portrayal or representations of gender roles in texts not read in the unit.
Again, providing choices for different projects enhances motivation to complete their chosen project.
Activity: Analyzing Units
Go to the website and select some units from the sample course syllabi, units, lesson plans, and activities link. What do you perceive to be strengths and limitations of these units? How would you revise these units to improve them?
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