Alienation, Belonging, and Learning AP-style Writing

Teaching for Understanding

The ability to think and act flexibly with what one knows.

Title: Search for Self and AP-Style Writing (Summer Reading Seminars)	Course(s): Advanced Placement
Topic: Identity Development in Bildungsromans: Alienation and Belonging, Anxiety and Contentment in novels of formation	Grade: 12

Stage 1 – What do we want students to know, understand, and be able to do?

Understanding(s) Enduring ideas that are central to the subject. Students will understand that… Understanding: Students will understand how the author of a bildungsroman creates a protagonist that develops identities in response to environmental forces: interpersonal, social, historical, cultural, religious forces. Students will understand that the author of a bildungsroman shows how the protagonist’s experiences of environmental forces influences whether a character feels at-home or alienated in the environment. Authors also show the protagonist’s develop a belief that the world makes sense or is absurd. In bildungsromans these elements are dynamic and develop over the course of the novel through the author’s use of literary techniques. The protagonist’s development is shown not only through dynamic characterization and the plot—the logic of events—but also through imagery (allegorical, symbolic, and/or suggestive), other characters (including mentors, foils, and parallel characters), narrative point of view, tone, style, and other literary elements. Understanding: Students will understand that in a bildungsroman the author often creates a protagonist who has a naïve, innocent, received, incomplete, self-delusional, or otherwise insufficient understanding of the world. That understanding is threatened, undermined or shown to be wrong, naïve, insufficient, etc. (through encounters with elements of the environment, juxtaposition with other characters, etc.). The threatened understanding of the self in the world leads to a crisis (a break, a breakdown (an explosion, radical deprivation, etc.) which leads to a new identity for the protagonist. (The protagonist is transformed by ecstatic experience, is strengthened, broken, revealed by the conflict; the protagonist revises her identity, learns a lesson, etc.) The change is in response to the world as now understood in relation to the self. The change can be sudden, slow or some combination. Understanding: Students will understand that modern and post-modern bildungsromans often revise the traditional characteristics of the genre established in the nineteenth century. For example, in modern novels of formation the protagonist often does not come to manifest the spirit and values of the dominant society but rather lives in opposition to them, flees them, or is destroyed by them. (The source for tradition characteristics is Suzanne Hadler of Brown University.) Understanding: Students will understand that the depiction of identity formation in bildungsromans can be applied to the students’ own lives, particularly but not exclusively in personal essay writing which is the focus of the next unit of study.

Essential Question(s) Generative questions around which the topic may be organized. Question: How do bildungsromans show identity development in relation to the environment? How do bildungsromans address the following questions: Who are you and what is your place in the world? Does the world belong to you and do you belong to the world? Or are you alienated from the world? (Do you feel that you are an alien in your environment? Is your relationship to the world, your place in the world a problem? Do you feel anxiety, uncertainty about your place in the world? Or, perhaps you feel downright hostility from the world around you and therefore towards the world around you? Do you feel the world makes sense and rewards virtue and punishes vice? Or, does the world feel random and absurd?) Questions: How is identity formation depicted in a bildungsroman? Is a crisis (break / breakdown) necessary for development (break through)? How does that work? (What causes breakdowns? What causes productive breakdowns? Can it be in the nature of the circumstances leading to breakdown? Must it be in the person’s response? [After breakdown you can also remain broken down, no? (destroyed? defeated?) What is the role of ecstatic (heightened experience) and the crisis and the transformation? (Many of these questions were formed in direct response to comments made by Theo Theoharris of Harvard University.) Question: How have bildungsromans changed over time? Question: How can the study of bildungsromans be made relevant to a student’s own process of identity development.

Higher Order Thinking Skills	Analysis (in every lesson) Synthesis (in the creation of a prompt in lesson 1, in the creation of a thesis in lesson 3) Evaluation (in the self-assessment and peer-assessment aspect of lesson 3)
Knowledge and Specific Skills	Composition writing (including particular focus on prompt writing, thesis writing, use of direct evidence and quotation, and revision.)

Stage 2 – How students will demonstrate understanding

Performances of Understanding & Accompanying Rubrics	Lesson 1: AP Question 3 Style Essay (rubric attached) Lesson 2: Passage Analysis (rubric attached) Lesson 3: Thesis writing and finding apt support (rubric attached)
Other Evidence & Assessments	Student-led discussion notes and active read notes (read and/or collected in each lesson) provide further evidence of student understanding.

Stage 3 – Learning Plan and Instruction

Learning Experiences	Think-pair-share using student active reader notes. Student-led discussions related to essential questions and understandings. Student creation of essay writing prompts. Self-assessment and peer-assessment of writing.
Formative Assessment & Feedback	Self-assessment and peer-assessment Teacher feedback of essay writing leads to targeted areas of improvement for revision and subsequent assignments. Teacher feedback on student-led discussion Extension of discussion on class blog (apenglishghs2010.blogspot.com) with responses by peers and teacher

Massachusetts Framework Standards

8.33 Analyze patterns of imagery or symbolism and connect them to themes and/or tone and mood. 9.7 Relate a literary work to the seminal ideas of its time. 11.6 Apply knowledge of the concept that a text can contain more than one theme. 11.7 Analyze and compare texts that express a universal theme, and locate support in the text for the identified theme. 12.6 Analyze, evaluate, and apply knowledge of how authors use techniques and elements in fiction for rhetorical and aesthetic purposes. 15.10 Analyze and compare style and language across significant cross-cultural literary works. 16.12 Analyze the influence of mythic, traditional, or classical literature on later literature and film. 19.30 Write coherent compositions with a clear focus, objective presentation of alternate views, rich detail, well-developed paragraphs, and logical argumentation. 21.9 Revise writing to improve style, word choice, sentence variety, and subtlety of meaning after rethinking how well questions of purpose, audience, and genre have been addressed. 22.10 Use all conventions of standard English when writing and editing.

Attachments:

For the lessons I’ve chosen three of the summer seminars I conducted after taking “Tragedy and Hope”. (Lessons and assignments from the four summer sessions can be found at apenglishghs2010.blogspot.com.) In each session I used ideas from the “Tragedy and Hope” course, especially but not exclusively from the first two days which pertained most directly to the content of the summer seminars. Each session was four hours long.