Characters and their Needs

I first learnt about Maslow's Hierarchy when I was teaching Belonging as an Area of Study to Year 12. Preparing students to approach a prescribed text (in this case it was Skrzynecki's suite of poetry from Immigrant Chronicle) required some conceptual underpinning. We talked about things like connections to people, belonging to a place, belonging to a culture, and so on. 

I tell you what, I almost miss students writing that someone 'unbelonged' (though I definitely don't miss seeing The Blind Side and Shrek brought into class over and over again as related texts).

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs came up as a useful way of getting students to think about the internal and external lives of characters. We all know what it's like to belong or not belong, but being able to write about it with some degree of skill requires a framework for articulation. I've found Maslow's to be a very useful visualisation in this respect.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is one psychologist's interpretation of the different ways in which humans:

1. Behave
2. Are motivated
3. Develop emotionally/mentally

Abraham Maslow believed that, once a set of lower needs are taken care of, a person can then work on developing the higher needs. I've seen many different visualisations of what this looks like but the five tiers basically remain the same. Here's an example:

The idea is that, if a person's physiological needs aren't being met, then it will be difficult for them to even think about the level above it. As each level is accessed by a person they can then access the one above. The state of 'self-actualisation', in which an individual can make space/time to engage in creative pursuits or to moralise, is something that generally can't be achieved unless the other tiers are met in some way. 

I'll often put this pyramid in front of my class and ask students to consider the way the hierarchy builds on itself. Then we look at our class novel, for example Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, and I then ask students to map each of the characters against the Hierarchy of Needs. 

Consider the following characters:

• Lennie
• George
• Curley
• Curley's Wife
• Crooks
• Slim
• Candy

Once students get to know them, they should be able to posit whether a character is able to even consider the idea of friendship or not (Tier 3 of the pyramid). Is Crooks able to forge a friendship with Lennie and George? The possibility is raised in Chapter 4 but it doesn't quite work out that way. Why is that? In what way is Maslow's Hierarchy able to shed light on how Crooks might be feeling and why he's unable to form a lasting friendship with the others?

This kind of exploration can be repeated for each of the characters, and it gives students a framework for their empathetic analysis of the text. 

It's a simple idea but I've found that it works well for a number of texts, and especially for something like Of Mice and Men, which is very much about humans and the extent to which they're able to have their needs met when living in times of hardship. 

Galway Man: Stage 5 English

Hello and how are you? It feels like only yesterday that the 2019 school year was just starting and now here we are in Term 4. Before you know it, the last assessment tasks will be done and dusted, reports will be written, and students will start thinking about building forts in the woods and riding their BMXs down to the river (kids still spent their summer holidays doing that, right?)

In the last few weeks of Term 4 I usually find myself needing a few stand-alone lessons. It's important that these lessons don't feel like 'throw-away' content... when students cotton on that you don't attach value to what they're doing then they'll tend not to value it either. The antidote to this can be to work on the skills needed for ongoing success in English.

This lesson below is a Stage 5 activity that I usually use for Year 9 as part of a genre unit focused on creative writing. It can also double, however, as something that can be used to help students develop specialised literacy skills at any point in Stage 5 - for example, the ability to identify genre through recognition of common motifs and generic conventions used, the ability to monitor a text for adjectives and adjectival groups, and utilising comprehension skills to predict the direction a text will go in.

Context

Teaching Stage 5 English in a mixed ability classroom often means working with a broad range of students. Differentiated curriculum can take many forms when we teach and, perhaps most often, it tends to come into the classroom in a flexible rapid-response form via the teacher adapting to the fluctuating levels of ability exhibited by individual students. 

One of my favourite forms of differentiation is the the lesson planning process adapted from the Gagne model and used by GERRIC. This involves creating material that targets three separate tiers of ability within the classroom - mainstream material for the core of the class, adapted material for those who may be struggling to meet outcomes, and extension material for those who may be considered gifted. It's important to acknowledge here that 'extension' doesn't mean extra work, it should instead take the place of work undertaken by the main core of the class.

Another thing to acknowledge is that it's near impossible to differentiate every single lesson of work in this way as it essentially means doing three times the work. Instead, it's worth aiming to just do this every now and again so that you can assess what level your students are working at and evaluate how they cope with material that more specifically targets their ability level.

The Lesson: Galway Man

The crux of this lesson is a short horror story called Galway Man. This piece has been designed as something that should be suitable for a Year 9 class exhibiting a range of different abilities and behaviours.

What this means is - it's relatively short to allow for engagement of students who struggle with attention in the classroom, and it's written in a way to allow accessibility for students who may have reading levels as low as those typically encountered in Stage 3. It's important to push student reading levels by exposing them to material that will challenge them but this is something that should be done purposefully and not all the time. If we're looking to build things like vocabulary, sustained understanding via extensive comprehension of cohesion, or an ability to parse sophisticated sentence structures then, of course, we should be challenging students with texts beyond their usual reading scope. However, if we want to work on introducing students to other skills like understanding symbolism and imagery, or the ability to explain genre, then we need simply-constructed texts that can allow for these things to be the focus.

Resource: Galway Man - short story.

The Lesson: Pre-Reading

Before reading the text it might be worth doing a quick check of student understanding regarding the phenomenon of bog bodies as this is the main idea behind the 'horror' of the text. These bodies are human remains that have been accidentally preserved for thousands of years after being submerged in swampy peat-heavy marshland. Bog bodies tend to occur in Western Europe and date from the Bronze Age.

Resource: Pre-Reading - PowerPoint Presentation.

The Lesson: Post-Reading

Students can undertake one of the activity sheets after reading the short story. There are two ways to approach determining who does which sheet:

1. Hand out the three different levels of sheets according to which students you think fit into the 'core', 'adjusted', and 'extension' groupings of ability. If any students question why they can't have a different sheet then, by all means, let them have a go at the sheet they prefer. If they find it too easy then you've both learned something, if they find it too hard then at least they challenged themselves.
2. Let students pick the sheet they want to do - I usually place the sheets on a table underneath the whiteboard with arrows pointing down to the three piles labelling them as 'Regular', 'Hard', and 'Hardest'. It can very educational for the teacher to see which students pick which one. 

The sheets roughly correspond to the same pattern of learning broken into 4-5 sections.

• Prediction: After students have been taken through the pre-reading PPT, ask them to think about what a short story called Galway Man might be about. Students then compare their prediction to how the story turned out.
• Adjectives: Monitor the text to locate and isolate adjectives/adjectival groups.
• Character or Flashback: Students actively consider the process of characterisation. This looks different on each sheet - ranging from a visualisation activity to an opportunity for students to draw explicit connections between a character and his purpose in the text. Some sheets may add or replace this with an examination of the story's use of a flashback as a structural narrative device.
• Genre: Students identify the ways in which the story fits into a specific genre, developing increased awareness of the significance of code and convention.

Resource: Adjusted Activity sheet
Resource: Core Activity sheet
Resource: Extension Activity sheet

Write Right: Authentic Engagement and Creative Writing

It's November 2017 and the English Teachers Association NSW Conference is underway once again, bringing hundreds of English teachers together to talk crafty writing, Stage 6, new continuums, and all things multimodal.

My colleague, Kira Bryant, and I are presenting today on using mini-lessons to build engagement with students in relation to creative writing.

Here are our resources:

Resource: Write Right PPT (our presentation)

Resource: Activity booklet (this accompanied our presentation)

*Please note that the activity booklet omits the short story 'Grandpa's Place' as this piece appears in Volume 2 of the ETA's Creative Writing textbook

Characters of 1984

I haven't posted anything this month yet. The main reason for this is, well... there are actually lots of reasons for it, but they're mostly boring and you wouldn't care about them, O intrepid internet reader!

Anyway, here's a worksheet on the characters of 1984 - Character Analysis.

In said sheet, students explore the three main characters (Winston Smith, Julia, O'Brien) and find a corresponding quote from the text before answering a guided question for each one. The sheet also has summaries for the following supporting characters:

• Big Brother
• Mr Charrington
• Syme
• Parsons
• Emmanuel Goldstein

After students have been taken through each of the characters, get them to synthesise their thoughts on the supporting characters in response to one of the primary themes of the novel. This can be done through this question:

George Orwell's 1984 is primarily about the effect of totalitarianism on a society. Pick two supporting characters and discuss how they demonstrate this.

On a separate but related note, I recently had the pleasure of attending the recent stage production of 1984 created by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan. This took place at the Sydney Theatre, and the visit became possible thanks to my colleague Ashlee Horton, who organised it as a school excursion for some of our Year 12 Advanced English students.

The play starts in a somewhat disorientating manner, perhaps relying a little too much on the viewer's knowledge of the novel as various elements and characters coalesce together in a metatextual opening scene that meditates on the themes as much as the plot. From here though the production took hold of just about everyone in the audience with its arresting and inventive use of lighting and sound. Without getting too much into particulars, the experience is a wholly visceral assault on the senses that immerses the viewer in Orwell's world of surveillance and control, with the play building its own way into the story; both paying tribute to the novel whilst also making the best use of the medium of the stage.

I was left breathless by the end. It was also great to hear the students similarly inflamed and provoked by the play.

Write Right: Authentic Engagement with Creative Writing

This is my first time attending the AATE/ALEA National Conference and I couldn't be more chuffed! Kira Bryant and I are having a great time visiting Tasmania for the first time and want to say a big thank you to everyone involved in making the conference happen.

I would also like to personally express my gratitude to the Copyright Agency for granting me a scholarship to help make my attendance happen :)

Here are the resources that Kira and I presented.

Resource: Write Right PPT (our presentation)

Resource: Activity booklet (this accompanied our presentation)

*Please note that the activity booklet omits the short story 'Grandpa's Place' as this piece is scheduled to appear in an upcoming volume of the ETA's Creative Writing textbook series later this year.

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