By the time students reach their senior year in high school, they likely have extensive experience discussing and writing about various literary elements and how they impact the development of significant themes. This unit asks students to consider the relationships between elements of literature using a concrete, visual approach. Even in twelfth grade, many students struggle to articulate abstract concepts in literature, and graphic organizers are often helpful for these students. Conceptually, a graphic organizer is just a map: it does not show the user everything, but it demonstrates how specific pieces of information are connected. In this unit, students will go beyond the use of traditional organizers to create actual maps of various literary concepts.
Enduring Understandings
This unit reinforces the following underlying concepts:
- Maps can be used as a tool to clarify various forms of distance and location in literature.
- Mapping relationships between literary elements can illustrate their importance and reveal implicit ideas in a text.
- The process of mapping involves selection and spatialization, which can reveal important relationships in literature.
Essential Questions
The following questions are embedded throughout this unit:
- What is a map?
- How can literary elements be represented visually?
- How can a map function as a narrative, analytical, or argumentative statement?
- How do location and distance impact the development of literary themes?
- How do elements of literature interact to develop complex themes?
