Author Mentors: Ellen Van Neerven and Theme

This is Part 3 in a series on 'Author Mentors'. In a nutshell, these lessons are about using short extracts to scaffold student engagement; a way of backward mapping from the NSW Year 12 Craft of Writing module and the Year 11 Reading to Write module before that. 

After looking at context and structure, today's sample lesson moves into more conceptual territory - what an English teacher might traditionally call 'theme'. You will need a copy of Ellen Van Neerven's Young Adult anthology Heat and Light for the extract that forms the crux of these activities.

1. Extract. Start by reading a selected extract from Heat and Light as a class. The extract in question is from the first page of the short story 'Hot Stones'. It starts with 'Thirteen is the age that makes you,' and ends with 'Go easy. I have to see if we're related, first.'

Students then do a think-pair-share activity, discussing each of the following questions before responding in their books:

1. Tell me what you liked best about this extract.
2. Tell me about the main character in the extract.
3. Tell me how you would feel if you had been kicked out of English.
4. Tell me about the Grandmother.
5. Tell me why the main character is so interested in Mia. 

These are fairly straightforward questions designed to gauge comprehension and provoke a personal response. Comprehension is a key part of thematic engagement because the skill of summarising is the very core of what a 'theme' or 'concept' is. If a student is able to summarise something, then they are identifying the most significant aspects of the text. There is some degree of subjectivity in this, which is what we (the teachers) want because identifying or responding to a theme in a text is a highly subjective process. The more that a student is able to take a firm and individual position, the more they will find success in crafting a thesis for an extended response. 

In some Gifted and Talented/High Potential and Gifted Education circles, summarising leads to the higher order skill of abstraction; the ability to think of things in terms of concepts rather than plot points. 

2. Connecting. Once students have begun grappling with the text at a surface comprehension level (and perhaps deeper), move on to looking at the connections that can be made with the text. Again, this should be a subjective experience for each student. It doesn't matter how an outsider may judge the 'quality' of the student's answers, what's important is said student's ability to create their own connections when reading. The process of generating ideas of how to connect the text to other things is an entire step on its own before we look at guiding students in calling upon more judicious examples. Some students may struggle to make what the teacher sees as an effective connection, but this is why we look at doing this in Stage 5 or earlier... it's part of that backward mapping process that fosters skills needed for Year 11 and 12.

Anyway, ask students to connect: 

1. To Self - What is something you have in common with or something that makes you different from Colin?
2. To Text - What is a similarity that this extract shares with another text?
3. To World - What is something from the wider world or history that you can relate to this extract?

3. Considering Theme. Now we're ready for the final part of the activity. After thinking about the text in a few different ways, students are then asked to reflect and develop on their ideas. This starts with a prompt to concentrate the extract into a single-word abstraction. Students are then asked to develop this into a statement of theme, which is essentially a scaffolded way of getting students to develop a mini-thesis, or a conceptual understanding of the extract. Concept, idea, abstraction, or theme - it doesn't matter what you call it, it all supports the process of writing an essay.

1. If you had to summarise this extract as being about something in a single word, what would it be?
2. What opinion do you think the author might have about the single word you just wrote?
3. What do you think the extract is saying about this word?
4. You've now developed a thematic understanding of the extract. Find three quotes that support this theme.
5. Explain exactly how each quote supports your thematic understanding.

It is entirely possible to take this further by delving into structural territory and looking at techniques used, etc., but I would personally keep the focus tightly on theme. This reinforces the cognitive purity of the lesson in teaching one key thing. 

The above lesson can be found as a PowerPoint here. 

Acknowledgment: The following material has been adapted and modified specifically for this blog. I would like to acknowledge some of my colleagues - Ashleigh Galea, Lauren Hage, Amra Winter - who helped develop some additional material not included here.