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. 

See, Think, Wonder

A lone gum tree in Bega, photo from abc.net.au

Today I had the pleasure of attending an Into English professional learning session on the HSC Advanced English Module A comparative study of 1984 and Metropolis in Burwood, Sydney. Aside from being a nice day of collegial discussion and delivery of English guru-dom from Emily Bosco and Anthony Bosco, I found it especially useful as a jumping off point for an idea that I could use beyond the comparative study. 

This quick, simple and flexible activity that seems like it could endure a multitude of contexts is the See Think Wonder routine, developed by Harvard Project Zero as part of their Visible Thinking framework, and regularly touted by Into English as a reliable way to get students to externalise their process for text analysis.

The model is brilliantly straightforward:

• What do you see?
• What do you think about that?
• What does it make you wonder?

This can be applied in so many different ways, and for multiple KLAs at multiple stages of student development.  

By the time Emily Bosco had demonstrated an example for analysing Metropolis I had already started applying it to things I was currently teaching.

I'm currently doing Belonging as the Area of Study with my Year 11 Advanced class, with Skryznecki's Immigrant Chronicle as the Prescribed Text. In a week or so from now the class will be longing at an example of a Related Text, so I'll give them some guided questions in the See, Think, Wonder fashion.

SEE: What characteristics of belonging do you see in this text?

THINK: What perspective of belonging do you think is being communicated in this text?

What elements of context do you think may have influenced the composer of this text?

WONDER: In what way might this text relate to Skryznecki's treatment of belonging in his poetry?

The activity is effective because it pushes students towards incorporating observations into the thinking process and owning the answers to the questions. It shouldn't come as a surprise to most teachers reading this, but half the battle in helping students find success is getting them to take risks when it comes to learning. The See, Think, Wonder routine acts as a scaffold to encourage ownership of the analytical process.

Here's another example I'm toying with for use with Year 9 in their current study of indigenous poetry. It relates to the Oodgeroo Noonuccal poem Municipal Gum. 

SEE: What characteristics of Australian society do you see in this text?

THINK: What perspective of Australian society do you think is being communicated in this poem?

What do you think the context of the poet and poem might be?

WONDER: How might this poem relate to other poems we have looked at this term?

I hope to try it this week, so we'll see how it goes!

You can check out Into English here. They provide great professional learning on a range of HSC English modules, and I recommend them unequivocally.

For more on Harvard Project Zero's Visible Learning (particularly in regards to See Think Wonder), follow this link. This is also a great resource.

Technique Revision - Focus on Connotation

I started teaching a Preliminary Advanced English class this year and they're an absolutely fantastic bunch of students. As with all new classes, however, there needs to be some diagnostic testing (or pre-testing, if you prefer that term). Not all of this kind of 'testing' needs to be formalised and markable, oft-times it can just be something I've used to gather information that will influence the direction I take my class in over the next few weeks.

At the moment, we're looking at the Area of Study (Belonging) with a Prescribed Text (Immigrant Chronicle by Peter Skrzynecki). To get the ball rolling I decided to go over a big list of techniques and ascertain which ones the students were familiar with. So I put the list up on the board, like so:

Then an idea hit me. I told each student to rank each term out of 3 to show how well they knew them, with a score of '1' indicating that it was a term they didn't know at all. Then I ran around the class collecting all the 1s onto my own copy of the sheet, resulting in this:

The hand-scribbled term on the bottom right is 'enjambment', which I added after we had covered it in the poem St. Patrick's College.

Now I know which techniques we should be revising. I've been working through these over the last few days; just with a few asides where I put up some quotes on the board with the title of the technique and then asked the students to try and work out what the technique was. Here's an example that went quite well, where we discussed 'Connotation' and what it meant:

I forgot to take a photo before I started drawing all over it and editing bits of it. Sorry.

I started with two sentences:

• "Corporal Jones squeezed the trigger and removed the enemy"
• "Corporal Jones squeezed the trigger and murdered the enemy"

Then asked the question, what does connotation mean in relation to these sentences? The students started offering answers, most of them quite pertinent. We talked about the associations we made with the two different words:

• Removed = Good guy, tactical, in war.
• Murdered = Harsher, modal (emotional reaction)

And then, as a class, we came up with our own definition for Connotation: "The associations a reader makes with certain words".

After this, it was time to link it to our Prescribed Text, so I trotted out the poem Feliks Skrzynecki and eagled in on the word 'father'. What are the connotations of this term? What if it were a different term that essentially meant the same thing?

I put up these words:

• Father:
• Dad:
• Patriarch:
• Daddy:
• Guardian:

And asked students to fill in their own word associations, with some interesting results:

As these are senior students, I decided not to censor their association of the word 'Daddy' with 'sexual' and 'fetish'. Their minds went there and this is meant to be about word-association. It is what it is; that's the whole point of connotation. Plus there's far 'worse' in some of the HSC Prescribed Texts.

After we had finished brainstorming each of the terms, we established that 'Father' had a more formal connotation that set up a distance between the poet and Feliks.

Buoyed by how successful this quick exercise was, I decided to plough on a little further with the quote "They dug cancer out of his foot".

This went well too, with connections made between 'dug' with visceral language and gardening. Meanwhile, 'took' implied something far less painful than, say, 'scraped'.

Here's the technique sheet below if you'd like an electronic copy:
Techniques List