Message from tsprague

[Anonymous]

I must admit I have several lesson plans brewing, but here is my idea for one that connects to our group's study: it's actually something I've already been working on, but I want to incorporate what I find in China to this lesson. The concept is this: in order for students to become deeper readers/thinkers (in history or in English) they need to encounter and understand not one text, but several. In other words, learning is an intertextual process. (Not my idea, obviously; find out more at NCTE.org: search David Bloome for the article). Here's my spin on this intertextual idea: I want students to understand that the skills that they develop while reading/analyzing literature are the same skills they will use when reading art, reading buildings, reading people--essentially, reading literature is making them better readers of the world. So, I try to bring in texts other than the piece of literature that we're reading for students to analyze (and to connect to the original text). The term "text" is used very loosely here: a text is anything that can be read/analyzed; anything that a "writing" can be created from--this definition allows for objects, paintings, toys, games, advertisements, my grandmother's quilt (another story) to be defined as texts. So students might look at a short story about grief, and then look at a mask that an African might wear to a funeral to show his/her grief--then students are asked to find a connection between the two, or better yet, students are asked to communicate what insight the second text (the mask) might give them into the first text (the short story). I've explored the same process with paintings: my students have traveled to the Latin American Museum of Art, on the hunt for paintings with a similar theme as one in The Great Gatsby, or for a painting in which the artist used a similar technique (like repetition) that Toni Morrison uses in Beloved. When encountering multiple texts, instead of focusing on one, students are challenged to think more deeply, to make more connections, to see relevance in their studies.
What's my point? Thank you if you're still reading. I want to find other "texts" in China that I can share with students, and that they can connect with texts that we are already reading in class. I am looking for three types of texts: ones that communicate grief (for my Thanatology class); ones that reveal something about Chinese culture (for my World Humanities class); ones that require the reader to use the language of literature (ie texts that cannot be discussed without using literary terms: juxtaposition, motif, symbol, theme, irony, mood, tone, etc: of course, this type of text will be used in all of my classes).
Now I said that this had some relevance to our topic of study: it does. I think that a lot of what I'll be able to use will come from Chinese/Japanese buildings: temples, political structures, etc. Power--a theme that is ubiquitous in literature--will be a theme that we find among the political structures in China. I'm sure that the trip will be full of intertextual moments!