Sandra K. Friday
The Language Arts CAPT typically consists of a story followed by questions to which the students are asked to respond. There is nothing unusual about these questions. Any teacher might ask similar questions to his or her students after reading a piece of literature or viewing a film. One of the questions simply asks students, "
What is your initial response to the story
?"
Another question that might show up on the CAPT that I have asked my students for years is:
How does a character grow or change as the story unfolds?
A changing character is central to effective stories. Students can sharpen their skills to watch for these changes in a character's awareness of self and world-view. I have found it effective to ask students to make observations and support them with evidence from the text that shows the character:
at first
,
but
then
, and
finally.
In the CAPT, students are often asked to choose a passage or a quote and discuss its significance to the characters or plot. Since my unit deals with several films as well as literature, I plan to ask my students to
pick a scene in the film and explore how it is significant
to a character, to the plot, or to the lesson or theme; or if they have read a story, they will choose a passage or quote and do the same.
Students usually are asked to
connect
the CAPT story to their own personal experiences or to those of someone they know or know of. Students might connect the story with another story or with a movie they have seen. The better the reader or viewer gets at this skill, the more significant the story or film becomes to the reader or viewer, because the more the reader or viewer is able to link it to his or her world.
Finally, one of the most difficult questions that I ask my students to answer is whether they think the story is
good
or
effective
. It is always a challenge to get them past the automatic, "No, I didn't like it," or "Yes, I liked it." I explain that it is possible to find qualities that make a story effective even though any given reader may not like it. We spend considerable time grounding that abstract word "effective," with concrete questions such as: Is there a lesson in the story?; Are the characters struggling with a conflict?; Is the story believable?; Does it have convincing details? I have found that the more terms students learn with which to critique a story or a film, the more open they are to it. "No, I don't like it." often means, "I have no way of responding to it because I don't know the mechanism, or the formula or structures for responding. I don't have the vocabulary."
I have chosen stories that
produce
,
use
, and
resolve
anxiety because I think these stories will elicit responses from the students. The CAPT-like questions will be driven by this universal human emotion as it plays itself out in the very specific lives of children in the process of growing up in diverse cultures around the world: the anxiety of an eight-year old Chinese girl sold, under the guise of a boy, by her impoverished parents, to an old puppet master who longs before he dies, to pass on his craft to a
male
child; the anxiety an Iranian boy suffers when he, inadvertently, loses his younger sister's only pair of shoes on the way home from the shoe repair shop, and their abortive attempt to
share
his large shoes to go to school, while he struggles to find a way to replace what his poor parents cannot afford to replace.
This unit will examine the mechanisms, formulas, structures, and vocabulary for responding to stories (both film and literature) that
produce
,
use,
and
resolve
anxiety in children growing up in diverse cultures around the world. Ultimately, as students are exposed to various formulas for storytelling, they will themselves become storytellers in a final project.