Elysium - Characterisation and Representation of Ideas

The first shot of Max establishes a few things: the cramped nature of his house, his criminal or low socio-economic background (reflected in the Latino-styled tattoos), and the dated technology in his home juxtaposed against the robots and space station outside.

I'm a big believer in advocating for students who might not be harnessing their gifts to their fullest potential. In English, this means those students who are naturally gifted in terms of critical thinking and analysis, although they may not have the skills to formulate these gifts into the traditional modes of English communication (writing, representing, reading, etc.) So, with this in mind, I think there's still a lot of room in Preliminary Advanced English for scaffolding students. I don't want to assume that a student comes into Advanced English already knowing everything, and that includes knowing all the "how to" skills. What would be the point of that? If a student already knows what you're teaching and how to do it, then they should be skipping grades and looking for early entrance to university!

I've spoken about using Elysium as part of a comparative study on dystopian texts here, here and here, so I wanted to extend this a little further to show how students can analyse the way characterisation reflects the themes and context of the film.

My first-year teaching self would have just asked the students to look at a character and tell me what they represent. I would have left it open-ended in the belief that an Advanced English student could pour their magic mojo on it and interpret the characters independently. My time teaching a multiplicity of students and diverse student-types has taught me that this approach only achieves one thing: it gets answers out of those who already know how to do it. 

The mercenary Kruger is modeled after the notorious rogue soldiers known as 32 Battalion, who served in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. The shot above, where he uses a samurai sword to BBQ meat on a rooftop, reflects the ease and confidence in which he moves within the dangerous favelas.

In recent years I've been taking a different approach to high-achieving students. Why not just give them all the information they need, and therefore force them to focus more explicitly on the skills rather than the content? This isn't a new idea... it's reflected in flipped classrooms, project-based learning, scaffolding, etc., so it's not so much an epiphany as just a reinforcement of where I want to push the students.

The lesson below features character profiles of the major figures in Elysium - Max, Frey, Delacourt, Kruger, Spider, and Carlyle. Each profile contains some basic shot analysis, explanations of the etymology of the character's name, and additional context that links to what writer-director Neill Blomkamp was aiming for in his stylistic choices for how the characters are represented. It's all there for the students. They wouldn't know this stuff automatically; I had to arrive at the contextual knowledge through my own research and analysis so it would be silly to assume that the students could come up with this deep knowledge of content on the spot during the lesson.

The point is to instead discuss and read this stuff with the students and then get them to deconstruct the character with a higher order question (EG. 'In what way...', 'What is the significance...'). The student takes the information given to them and uses it to formulate their own response. It's okay for the information to be explicitly given to them because they're essentially doing what a university student does, which is working with a reading or text to bring a diverse array of content into their own hands as they put pen to paper. The more they do this, the wider and deeper their personal knowledge of the subject will become. It's not a radical concept; I just wanted to share the resource below and explain how it works :)

Resource - Representation/Characterisation in Elysium