Aaron J. Brenner
I will humbly admit that the best part of this unit is the list of resources (the Annotated Bibliography for Teachers and the Reading List for Students). There you will find a plethora of texts that will allow you to tailor your lessons to many different classes and many different levels and types of students. If you are an art teacher, you can examine how the illustrations accompanying the various adaptations of this story have changed across cultures and over time. You could even examine how the iconography associated with the tale has been used in various media at various times to reach a wide range of audiences for a variety of purposes. The objectives and lessons below are not geared toward that end, but reviewing the resources listed in the bibliography would certainly give you a good start on a unit of your own that is suitable for an art class.
If you are a history teacher, the history of adaptations to this classic story could be used as a vehicle to travel through time exploring the evolution of society as expressed through “Little Red Riding Hood.” To give context to each version you choose to study, you could explore a variety of themes related to the role of women in society and the enculturation of children through storytelling. You could easily examine how the small details in each incarnation change to suit the period, place, and people of its creation.
The unit as created more appropriately serves an English class, but even then there is a great deal of latitude for adapting the materials to suit anything from a creative writing class to a low-level class of freshman to a gifted class of AP Language and Composition students. The source materials can be used address plot structure, the use of imagery and symbolism, allegory, synecdoche, character development, creating tension and suspense, a writer’s audience and purpose, and social and historical context, among other elements of the English classroom.
In Appendix A you will find a list of formal objectives to be focused on in this unit, all taken directly from the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy. Please feel free to ignore them; I often do. One practical objective of this unit is to raise cultural and self-awareness in your students while simultaneously improving their abilities to read, analyze, discuss, and adapt literary texts. The real motive, though, is to foster the connections with each other and their communities that will help your students become lifelong lovers of reading and the kind of people who will leave the world a better place than they found it.