Sandra K. Friday
Preparing my at-risk high school students to take the Language Arts component of the Connecticut Academic Performance Test is a daunting undertaking, requiring me to be creative and sometimes downright ingenious in coming up with lesson plans that appear to my students to have little or nothing to do with a test that many of them dread because of their limited skills. Many of the students in the second-chance program for at-risk high school students where I have taught for ten years have already, at least once, come up against the
timed
CAPT that is administered over a period of six days. They often do not finish the test because they run out of time or they grow discouraged and simply give up. Some, conditioned by failure, don't open the test booklets.
More and more, I have come to infuse my lessons with CAPT activities without identifying them, as such, to the students. At the same time, I have come to realize that many of my students' activities are, inadvertently, CAPT-like activities. It has become clearer and clearer to me that the skills required to get through and reach proficiency in the Language Arts CAPT are significant skills for our students, regardless of the test.
With this challenge in mind, my unit focuses on story-telling in films and literature with lessons based on skills that students need, not only in taking the Language Arts CAPT, but in any subject they might study in which they must: make observations and back them up with evidence, make connections to life, interpret meanings, make evaluations, and communicate their findings. . . skills they need regardless of the content.
Story telling thrives in all cultures of the world, making it an effective vehicle for students to explore various cultures at the same time that they are learning and sharpening language skills. As the world grows smaller through technology, students need exposure to multiple cultures and the values that make them up, many of which are universal and shared.
We naturally are separated from other cultures by geography, language, clothing, customs, traditions, religion, and politics to name only a few barriers that make
foreigners
seem distant and different. But the language of emotions that cuts across cultures is one that we all share and speak. In my unit, students will explore how
stories
produce
,
use
or
play out
, and
resolve
the universally shared emotion of
anxiety
. Children can be seen in the throes of anxiety on the pathway to growing up in diverse cultures. We will see anxiety registered in both film and literature coming from China, New Zealand, Australia, Iran, and in our own country. Students will be challenged to consider what is unique about anxiety-producing situations in each culture and yet how each situation is also universal. While the films I have chosen feature children and can be viewed by children, they were crafted for a wide audience of all ages.
It is my ambition that, although this unit features viewing films supplemented by reading literature, my students, with their new working knowledge of the principles of story-telling, will themselves become story-tellers, turning out their own stories based on the anxieties, real or fictional, that they experience in their own cultures, on their pathway to growing up. In addition to the Language Arts skills that students will hone, they also will explore the craft of narrative. . . how, in eighty-nine minutes on screen or eight or nine pages, the storyteller can compress time, vividly depict characters, and in the case of this unit, create compelling anxiety-producing conflicts that must be resolved in a few frames or pages.
The storyboard is one means of showing students how to grasp the changes in scenes, plots, and emotions across a movie-length story. I will introduce this device when analyzing world films and
then
suggest that students use it in setting up their own stories when they come to that activity.
