Ashley Buck

EDSE 786

Dr. Mary Styslinger

11-06-17

Workshopping the Cannon

According to Dr. Styslingers work, the first step to workshopping the cannon is to push

the focus from product to understanding. As a teacher, focus must move away from having

students create, though that is important, and toward making sure students understand the

reading. The focus of an English classroom should be that of fostering a life-long love of, or at

least ability to read. As it stands now, many English teachers attempt to do this, but fall short and

merely teach students that their connection to the text does not matter; all that matters is what the

teacher says about the text.

I am working on a text set for The Crucible. After determining that I want my students to

focus on reading and skills they can gain from the novels we read, the next step is that of finding

a unit focus. My focus is going to be on how to deal with intolerance and discrimination. Those

issues are huge in the world right now, especially in high school to young adults. For them, their

whole world centers on their peers, and if they are being discriminated against, learning how to

deal with that issue will be an important skill for them to possess.

I will begin workshopping The Crucible by introducing the subject. Before we even start

talking about the book, I want to introduce the idea of intolerance and discrimination. I will let

students choose one of the articles I have found that show some form of discrimination in the

world today, and I will then ask them to relate it to their lives. I will tell students that the same

pressures that they are feeling are not new, and read Let Them Play by Margot Theis Raven to
them, which I discovered through Workshopping the Cannon by M. Styslinger. My students

pressures matter, but there are times when discrimination has led to the punishment of innocent

children, or even death. This method of introducing The Crucible would likely pique their

interest, and hopefully get them to join me in reading it. Before jumping into reading the play, I

will have students do a web quest to find background information on the Salem Witch Trials.

Once students have some background knowledge, I will read act one, scene one of The Crucible

with them as a class, then we will discuss any confusions they may have. I will also ask students

to be taking note of any discussion questions they think they could ask, and let them know that

we will be doing something with them later.

After reading the first scene of the play, I will tell them that we are going to do book

clubs. I will have prepared them beforehand to book clubs with proper scaffolding. We will have

at least three days where that is the main focus of our lessons, and I would start the clubs as the

last unit in the second quarter. I will host a book talk for each of the novels that are available to

be read for book clubs. I would have each student write their top four choices of novels, and

assign them accordingly. Students will meet with their clubs on Mondays and Thursdays, and at

the first meeting, they will create a reading calendar to hold themselves accountable. Every other

day that we meet other than those days, I will read a scene of the play and we will discuss the

scenes from different points of view and through different lenses.

The book club books that they can read are Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose, If You

Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, Homeless Bird by Gloria

Whelan, The Raging Quiet by Sherryl Jordan, and Dear Martin by Nic Stone. I chose the first

one because it is a play, the same format as The Crucible. If You Could Be Mine is a novel that

focuses on the lesbian relationship between two Iranian girls. The Hate U Give is a novel that
looks at the relationship of a black girl to her home- both the people and the community.

Homeless Bird is about an Indian girl who is married off at a young age, but almost immediately

becomes a widow who is hated by her deceased husbands family, but still forced to live with

them. The Raging Quiet is also about a girl who is married off and quickly widowed, but she

lives in a coastal village and is accused of witchcraft because she learns to communicate with a

deaf boy. Dear Martin is told from the perspective of a black boy who is on the path to an Ivy

League college when he and a friend are pulled over by an off-duty cop and get into an argument

that ends in gun shots. Each of these works deal with some form of intolerance or discrimination,

and they are all told from very different perspectives. I would definitely use a permission slip

with Homeless Bird and The Raging Quiet, and I would need to do some more research on the

rest of them before knowing if I would need one for them. The works vary in length and

complexity, and I feel that anyone in need of reading instruction would still have a choice, as

well as anyone who was more advanced.

Students who need help with their reading comprehension will have an entire group of

readers who will be reading the same novel as them and can help them. I will be reading The

Crucible aloud, and checking for comprehension along the way with chapter questions that they

will be expected to answer either as I am reading, or at home for homework after I have read.

For act one, scene two, I will introduce my students to theoretical lenses. I know that

sometimes teachers assume that critical theory is too advanced for all but AP, IB and upper class

honors level students; I feel that, with proper scaffolding, all students are capable of handling it. I

want my students to have faith in their abilities, and doing something like this with a CP class

would be the perfect thing for them to begin to understand that they have the ability to do higher

level work than they would have ever dreamed. I would start with a lens that seems a little bit
easier than some of the others: feminist theory. Using an online resource that I found to introduce

feminist theory (https://www.prestwickhouse.com/samples/302712.pdf), I would ask students to

list all the characters in the play, and we will work together to map out how they fit into the

society around them. After we have the character map made and everyone has copied it down, I

will ask which characters the class thinks hold the most power in the Puritan society. We will

make a list of those who have the least. Every student who suggests a name must have a reason

they think so, or they can phone a friend they think can help them. Using our character list, I will

have students list the names of the accusers, and then the victims. We will look at which

characters who were accused, executed, and released, and what role gender played in each facet.

Would the story would have changed had any of the key players been of the opposite gender?

Would certain characters still have been discriminated against? In order to ensure that students

who are quiet or shy get to share their thoughts, I will have students write the answer to this last

prompt down as an exit slip. At the close of that portion of the lesson and before they pass their

papers to the front of the room, I will tell them that they have just analyzed the play from a

critical theoretical perspective.

After this lesson, the next class that does not include a book club meeting will be us

focusing on more of the history of Puritan society. I would introduce pieces of The Salem Witch

Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community under Siege by Marilynne Roach and Death in

Salem: The Private Lives Behind the 1692 Witch Hunt by Diane Foulds. The first book is one

that I think, after research from http://historyofmassachusetts.org, covers the trial in

chronological order of events. The second book focuses on the personal lives of those involved

in the trials, ordered by the roles they played (i.e. victims, accusers, clergy, etc.). I chose this one

because of the humanizing aspect it gives to the characters.

 I also think that a Socratic seminar would be interesting to have because of the nature of

this play. There is a lot to debate about the play, so I think it would be interesting to see how

students perceive it. After getting through the end of Act Two, I will tell students to pull out their

list of discussion questions and read over them; if there are any questions they think will lend

well to a discussion of intolerance in Puritan society. I will then tell them that we are going to

practice a Socratic Seminar about the girls reactions when accused of committing witchcraft. I

will facilitate this discussion, asking the first question: why did they accuse so many innocent

people of witchcraft? For practice session of the seminar there will be five seats in the center of

the circle, with the outer circle focusing on the things that are going well and how we can

improve other things for the real seminar. The inner circle will debate my question and keep

moving forward with as little input from me as possible. There will be a sixth seat, a hot seat,

where students who feel they have something important to add to discussion can have their input.

The next class day that is not devoted to a book club meeting will be the graded Socratic

seminar.

Throughout everything we read, I will have students keeping a list of unfamiliar

vocabulary they come across. They will jot the words down in the back of their notebooks

(whether a binder or an actual notebook is up to them). By the end of the unit, I expect them to

have at least ten that they have found either in the reading we have done in class, or from their

book club novel.

As a culminating project, I will have students write as if they were being tried as a witch

in the Salem trials, and how they would deal with that intolerance/discrimination. They will write

a narrative or come up with a soundtrack to describe their journey, or they can choose to write an

Act Five, after where The Crucible ended. If they choose to create a soundtrack, they will need to
explain why they chose the songs they did. With either choice they make, they will use two of

their ten new vocabulary words in some manner in this project. I will go over some grammar

rules before beginning this project (proper use of capitalization and punctuation, and anything

else I have noticed students struggling with in their writing over the unit).

In grading their final project, I will have a rubric that I will share with all students so that

they know exactly what grade to expect based on the work they give me. I will make sure that

they know I will take off for the grammar rules that I taught them, but if it is something we did

not go over, I will not take off. I am not testing them on knowledge they were given in the past

just on what they have learned in my class. I want students to have the skills to deal with

intolerance and discrimination in a way that can be productive and change-causing in a society

that does not appreciate being told they are wrong.