Picturing Parodos // Connecting with the Text Through Illustration
Since taking an aesthetic reading stance has been linked to the ability to "see" what is happening in a story, I wanted to see if explicitly asking students to illustrate a challenging text could make it more accessible to them and allow them to form a more personal connection with it. At the beginning of our unit on Antigone, I divided my seniors into groups and asked each group to illustrate a stanza from the "Parodos," which is the first choral ode and tells the backstory of the battle between Antigone's brothers which results in both their deaths and leads to the king Creon's decree that Polynices must not be buried. Students had seemed intimidated by the language in the Prologue, but I thought that if they were given a very small section of text to read closely, they might be surprised by their ability to comprehend it. Unfortunately, they seemed to be more confused by this, since the sections they were given had to be read out of context of the rest of the passage. Even when the illustrations (above) were lined up side-by-side, the students were unable to connect them into a cohesive narrative or answer follow-up questions I posed to the group. In addition to being unsuccessful in helping them better understand the text, the activity seemed to do little to motivate them to keep reading. They had complained about reading assignments before, and they continued to do so afterwards. Furthermore, throughout the unit, several students openly admitted to not doing the work and failed reading check quizzes which were instituted per the suggestion of the my classroom mentor that they be used to keep the students accountable. In "I just need to draw," Short et al. (2000) discuss students being inspired to draw and participate in other creative pursuits upon reading literature that engages them. Based on my experience with this activity, it seems that the reverse is not true - that drawing does not inspire students to engage with literature that they did not already feel connected with.
In her feedback on my lesson plan (below), my classroom mentor suggested that I give students more concrete details to look for throughout their reading of the play. In response, I implemented a quote log (right) to get students to focus on and examine the language of the play moving forward. On the aesthetic-efferent spectrum, this feels like a compromise. While focusing on the sound of language and the specific words that are used in a text can lead to an aesthetic experience, the "comprehension" focus of the quote log seems to be in tension with Rosenblatt's argument that it is a mistake to think that students must understand the accepted, public meaning of a text before they can connect with it. In the future, I might experiment with a different version of the quote log that still draws students' attention to specific lines but asks them to free-write (or free-draw) about what ideas and/or images the words in those lines call to mind for them, rather than having them paraphrase and discuss the significance of the text (these could instead be covered during follow-up discussions in class).
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