Mary K. Donahue
This unit will focus on using various methods to aid students in understanding the concepts of individuality and conformity as presented by art and literature.
Students will:
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- Build an arsenal of knowledge about various Transcendental writers and apply their theories to looking at today’s society
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- Learn to look at pieces of art and dissect them for meaning
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- Compare and contrast pieces of art against other pieces of art, and art to literature. This will aid the student in the journey toward understanding the gargantuan idea of ‘society in America’ and what it means to artists and writers, as well as individuals.
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- Apply this knowledge to look objectively at the progression of society through the years to modern times
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- Research an aspect of today’s society- looking into the origins of a societal set such as: goth, punk, preppie, urban, etc. Basing their argument on Emerson and Thoreau’s philosophies they will create a multimedia presentation for the class which explores the connections between their origins and how they are now viewed by society
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- Compose an original piece that represents them as an individual, apart from society and their views.
The students must be able to connect to these ideas on a personal level. The philosophical ideas that are introduced to them through Transcendentalism can be hard to grasp and comprehend. Students always work better when they can find a way to relate to the material that’s in front of them. Simultaneously, it is imperative that these students begin to view society and the world that is being presented to them with a critical eye. Hence, the main goal of this unit will be to allow students to view the differences between society and the individual through both exploring other writers and artists and exploring their fellow students and their beliefs.
Note
These lessons are designed to be taught in a ninety-minute block; however, I have planned for these lessons to take about seventy minutes, leaving some time for journal writing, vocab building, or just ‘business’ to be taken care of as well.
Notes on where and when this unit will be taught
This unit is being designed for teaching sophomores at Hill Regional Career High School in New Haven. The students will be in Honors English. Since sophomore English is a survey course, the students are required to move chronologically from Puritan times to the Civil War. Career’s curriculum focuses on Business and Medical tracks. All of the students who attend hope to find an occupation in one of these fields. As a result, they do not have the opportunity to take any art classes. Since interpretation of both art and literature can go hand and hand, and does concur, I feel that this is an irrepressible opportunity to combine them and expose students to a skill they may not otherwise learn. Classes at Career operate on a rotating block schedule. Each class is ninety-two minutes long, but you only have your class every other day. This leaves a lot of room for intensive study within the class period, but also proves a challenge for sustainability. It can be difficult to ensure that the breakthroughs you make during one class will be recallable for the next lesson.
Although the majority of the literature in this unit will focus on the mid 1800’s, we will seek to surpass this era and look at the idea of conformity in a few modern respects. Upon arriving at our Transcendental unit, we will have already covered ‘The Birth of America’, Puritans, the Revolution, and some poetry. Most of the material will have focused on the good of America as a whole. Many early writers chose to concern themselves with the idea of developing our nation into a functioning country, as well as a place for supposed religious freedom. In our previous units, we will have discussed the idea of these two beliefs functioning as a mechanism for conformity. For instance: although religious freedom was proposed and believed to be the main reason for traversing to America, once here, the Puritans quickly founded their colonies on the constraint of practicing the ‘right’ religion. We will study, through both Arthur Miller and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writings, how the ‘whole’ reacted to this view and what was done to change it.
The Crucible
by Arthur Miller and either
The Scarlet Letter
or various short stories of Hawthorne’s, are really the best representations of the Puritan times even though both wrote long after this time had come to an end. That almost makes their writing more valid, because they are able to write about the times with a spin from the future. The same will go for the Revolutionary period- we will briefly discuss what was done to those who were believed to be ‘unpatriotic’ enough to agree with British parliament. Therefore, when we begin our unit on societal vanity we will be able to draw on these base suggestions and ideas about conformity that we have already discussed.
This unit will deal mostly with Transcendentalist writings, and will focus heavily on the idea of society functioning as the opinion of the majority. We will discuss the differences between individuals acting as such, and individuals acting as an extension of the idea of ‘society’. We will have just finished reading the entirety of Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter
, which deals chiefly with the idea of a Puritanical woman living with a sinners mistake.
The Scarlet Letter
, Hester Prynne is a married woman with an absent husband in a small New England settlement that becomes pregnant by a Reverend. She chooses to bear her ignominy alone rather than disclose her lover for a sinner. Therefore, the students will be comfortable with the themes of ‘society’ and ‘individuality’, but will not have discussed the fundamental ideas behind them. We will begin this unit by reading Emerson and then branch out into other texts.