My first reflection!
So, in this Edutopia.org (great teacher site, you should check it out) blog-post, Humanities teacher, a Mr. James Earle, found that students were more engaged in the classical literature of Homer when they tracked instances of rage within the narrative of The Iliad and then creating a data visualization (a graphic presentation of data). Students in Mr. Earle’s Humanities class, after first deciding on a theme, made hypothesizes about which group of characters would present more rage: gods, Trojans, or Greeks. They then held a contest to figure out a way to manage and organize the data, making the students think of user-friendly data management systems. Next, “[f]or the duration of the project, [they] all shared one Google Spreadsheet where everyone had editing access. The class created a schedule that placed three students in charge of data entry, maintenance, and accuracy each week.” (Earle, 2015) incorporating collaboration and mathematics/statistics into a literary study. After the book was read, the class analyzed the data and wrote persuasive essays using the data as evidence.
What I appreciated about this article and Earle’s experiment is that it is, at its core, very much focused on interdisciplinary collaboration. He has woven the scientific method, quantitative research strategies, and literary analysis all into one unit. This not only allows students to analyze the literature in a fresh way that makes the content leap off the page because you are actively hunting for data, it also engages students who may be more literal and logically or scientifically minded. English is a required academic course, thus, there will always be science and math loving kids who do not like English because of its abstract, metaphorical nature. Earle’s technique allows those reluctant English students to engage in the material as well. This activity lends itself very nicely to introducing critical thinking and inquiry into the classroom as it depends on the interpretation of data, you have to decipher as a class what the data means. Earle’s post also provides the teacher-reader with free resources to aid in creating visual data.
Now, onto the question of how I would apply this to my own teaching? Most of the time big, classical texts like Homer is not part of the Canadian curriculum but I would use this in a Shakespeare unit no problem. I could very easily incorporate this into my Macbeth unit. We could track the instances of the supernatural, the mention of children, mentions of murder, or, one of my favorite themes: unnaturalness and inversions of the natural order. It lends itself quite nicely to my theme of visualization of theme and character within the unit. At the same time, however, if no students are into tracking data like this, it could seem come across as a boring project. By the time I teach the Macbeth unit, I hope that I will know my students’ interests enough to know if this project is something that would make the literature more interesting for them or just confirm their suspicions that Shakespeare is just a boring dead dude.
You can check out Mr. Earle’s video about his project here: The Iliad: Visualizing the Complexities of War