The Art of Magic: Studying Magical Realism through a Cultural Lens
A 10 week unit for the eleventh grade classroom
Throughout this 10-week unit, students will be using a variety of magical realism texts (short stories, poems, novels, articles, etc.), as well as engaging in many writing exercises to broaden their understanding of literary concepts, personal writing styles, and their view of other cultural values that are deeply embedded in the genre of magical realism.
Class Specification & Assusmptions
I chose this unit to be explored in an eleventh grade classroom, because they should already be equipped with a foundation of deeper readings skills. Many of the activities they will engage in require scaffolding, and I do not expect that the material will always be easy for all of my students. However, the students should already have a strong hold on such things as inferences and the use of different literary devices to make the lessons more worthwhile. As I get to know my students as individual learners, these assumptions will be easier for me to gage.
Students will have the ability to experience texts and ideas that interest them, and in the end they will have the ability to apply what they have experienced through the classroom exploration to form real life applications and a way to relate to literature in a more cultural light. We will be reading four different novels throughout the unit. However, in order to complete four novels in the short 10-week period, the class will be split into groups of no more than five students to read the novel that they selected. This allows students to choose a novel closer to their literary tastes, which will have a large influence in their final projects. The students will also be writing a creative piece near the end of the unit that directly relates to the theme of magical realism and its relation to culture. Their reaction to culture will greatly be influenced by the unit's embodiment of the overlapping ideas of multiculturalism and multiple perspectives. Having a greater understanding of different cultural beliefs can broaden perspectives a student has with the world, and it can help them better understand some diversity about the country in which they are living.
Students will have the ability to experience texts and ideas that interest them, and in the end they will have the ability to apply what they have experienced through the classroom exploration to form real life applications and a way to relate to literature in a more cultural light. We will be reading four different novels throughout the unit. However, in order to complete four novels in the short 10-week period, the class will be split into groups of no more than five students to read the novel that they selected. This allows students to choose a novel closer to their literary tastes, which will have a large influence in their final projects. The students will also be writing a creative piece near the end of the unit that directly relates to the theme of magical realism and its relation to culture. Their reaction to culture will greatly be influenced by the unit's embodiment of the overlapping ideas of multiculturalism and multiple perspectives. Having a greater understanding of different cultural beliefs can broaden perspectives a student has with the world, and it can help them better understand some diversity about the country in which they are living.
MN State Standards Addressed
College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Reading
3. Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.
College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Speaking, Viewing, Listening, and Media Literacy
1. Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.
College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Writing
3. Write narratives and other creative texts to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event sequences.
3. Analyze how and why individuals, events, and ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.
- At times students may be analyzing all three of the aspects above, but they will always be analyzing how ideas develop and interact over the course of a text.
- Students will be looking at how the author brings their culture into their writing, as well as how the characters point of view is influence by their cultural beliefs.
College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Speaking, Viewing, Listening, and Media Literacy
1. Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.
- This will be a commonly pursued standard in this unit due to the amount of work each book group will be doing with one another. Not only that, but students will also experiences this when they have partner discussions, peer review sessions, large scale class discussion, and in brainstorming activities.
College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Writing
3. Write narratives and other creative texts to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event sequences.
- Their final work of writing will be a creative text that explores all of the aspects of magical realism writing that they have learned throughout the unit while incorporating all of the necessary techniques of writing a short story.
- These aspects of the writing process will be pulled into their production of a magical realism short story.
- Within their book groups, they will be comparing and contrasting different works of literature to reflect on their current and past understandings of realism in literature.
Essential Questions & Enduring Understandings
Enduring Understandings
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Essential Questions
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Learning Experiences
The following list of activities serve as informal/formative assessments. All of the activities help to scaffold the desired outcomes and understandings of the unit, and some activities require scaffolding themselves. Since these activities tend to be scaffolding a larger outcome, they may fall under participation in the grade-book, however, students will be held accountable for success in these categories due to their importance as the unit progresses.
Whole Class
Group
Individual
Ongoing
Whole Class
- Large class discussions to talk about differences in book group books as the class progresses, as well as a way to raise the more general essential questions that will apply and overlap with all book group books. Large group discussions will also take place with their final project to allow student to learn from their classmate's ideas and understandings. It will also be used as a way of reflection when it comes to both summative forms of assessment.
- Mini lessons will be used as a way to drop in important aspects students need to have a full understanding of (i.e. MLA, writing a thesis, etc.) in order to successfully complete an assignment. Most mini lessons will be inspired through questions and roadblocks students pose and run into as they work.
- Think-pair-share will be used most often with students are discovering new ideas, and as a form of peer review that then develops further into a classroom discussion and feedback session.
- Brainstorming is an important part of any type of writing, and in the case of this unit, students will be writing two very different works. Brainstorming will be done individually, in groups, and as a class at times, but by sharing ideas students are able to develop their own further and with more depth.
Group
- Book group discussions start out as a very guided activity, but as students become more comfortable with that type of working environment, it becomes more independent within each group. By splitting the class up into groups to read different books, the class is able to develop a variety of different contrasting ideas and new information from each novel. It also helps to appeal to individual interest when it comes to reading.
- Peer editing will take place with through major writing pieces students work on over the course of the unit. First, book circle groups will be writing a research of culture paper that will allow students to edit their peers' progress throughout different stages of their drafting. This will then lead into their individual works of magical realism writing that will undergo similar stages of drafting that require review and editing sessions.
Individual
- Exit cards are individually completed, but they are generally used as a way for me to informally measure the learning the class has experienced so far throughout the unit. It also shows me where students are struggling, and with what I need to provide more guidance.
- ReQuest activity allows each student to build on their abilities as a reader by having them write and explore different ways a text can be analyzed.
- Playing cards activity (students use index cards to create/explain main themes, characters, turning points, cultural aspects, and symbols in story) is a device that is used early on in the unit to help scaffold before students begin to read magical realism individually.
- Webquest will be used as a brainstorming exercise to start their final writing assignment. By taking advantage of technology, I am able to engage the students with something they are very familiar with, and it allows me to view their ideas in one place online.
Ongoing
- Journalling is used throughout the entire unit to reflect on reading, explore ideas or questions brought up from the text, brainstorm the current writing assignment, and to scaffold for the final summative assessment. The journals allow the students a place to keep a large amount of writing that is easily accessible for reflection.
- Vocabulary is an important part of this unit, and one of the book group roles deals specifically with that topic. The main purpose of discovering new vocabulary is as simple as building each students' vocabulary and exposing them to more academic vocabulary in preparation for standardized testing.
- Questioning circles are used mainly in the book circle groups, but for the entirety of the time they read the novel. The question circle forces students to pose questions that arise directly from the text that move beyond surface level understanding into more meaningful questions dealing with their personal life as well as the relation of text to the world.
Culminating Experiences
This unit consists of two very influential formal, summative assessments:
1. Book group presentations that not only discuss their book with the class, but also have a large focus on the culture behind the words (involves a group research paper about culture portrayed throughout the novel).
This assessment is largely building up to the second summative assessment. Through their work with the group, they are able to shape their understandings of magical realism and its application to the real world through their research paper. Through the research paper, they will be discovering how culture largely influenced the magical/mystical aspects of their novel their group is reading. I chose to do this as a group activity to allow for a larger variety of texts to be discovered. That is why each group will be presenting. Through the presentations, their classmates are able to experience a part of what they read. Through the classes culmination of knowledge, their understanding of magical realism will be broad and cross cultural in understanding. |
2. Creative writing piece (fictional short story, personal narrative encompassing aspects of magical realism, etc.) in the form of magical realism. This assessment requires me to pair up with the art teacher to have a project that allows students to construct their personal “culture” or the culture in which they are from that includes at least one aspect of magical realism.
Although reading and writing are the backbone of this unit, magical realism began through art. With that in mind, I thought that an incorporation of viewing art and creating art would help students really be able to encompass a main understanding they took from the unit. Early on in the unit, there will be a wider variety of examples of magical realism through video, audio, and visual art. Many of these will lead to discussion. Throughout much of the unit, students will be working with a book group in which they will be involved in small group discussion as well as classroom discussion. The two projects involve the writing of a paper, and the unit also requires an array of journaling. The main final project is where their individual thinking will have to take the front seat, because they will be creating a short story and an art project that correlates. Final Assessment Guidelines
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Assessments and Grading
For both of the summative assessments, the students will be given a rubric and checklist to follow. During the process of scaffolding these assessments, students will be assessed using more informal measures, such as exit cards, short individual/group presentations, and conferences. Journals and drafting of their papers and short stories will allow for a more in depth depiction of how well my students are working towards the enduring understandings. Review of their written work allows for more constructive written feedback that students can easily refer back to while completing summative assessments. In order for me to have consistent feedback from my students, I use exit cards that we generally review in a following class period in the form of a discussion. This allows me to reflect on where the class is in their understanding, and specific areas they need more guidance.
Resources
Required Texts
Novels for Book Groups:
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The House of the Spirits by Isabelle Allende
The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquez
Short Stories:
“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” and “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” by Gabriel García Márquez
“The Smallest Woman in the World” by Clarice Lispector
“The Book of Sand” by Jorge Luis Borges
Other Related Resources:
Art/Paintings by Frida Kahlo and Fernando Botero
Media/Technology
SMARTboard or projector (not necessary, but would improve certain aspects)
Computer Lab accessibility
Novels for Book Groups:
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The House of the Spirits by Isabelle Allende
The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Marquez
Short Stories:
“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” and “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” by Gabriel García Márquez
“The Smallest Woman in the World” by Clarice Lispector
“The Book of Sand” by Jorge Luis Borges
Other Related Resources:
Art/Paintings by Frida Kahlo and Fernando Botero
Media/Technology
SMARTboard or projector (not necessary, but would improve certain aspects)
Computer Lab accessibility
Real Life Application
The main concepts that this unit is attempting to connect to individual students' lives are the ideas of culture and having multiple perspectives. Students will be able to bring their own beliefs about certain topics throughout the unit, as well as viewing multiple perspectives by attempting to see the writing through the cultural lenses of the author. Magical realism brings a lot of big questions to the table about reality and what we perceive has being real in our lives. Through writing their creative short story, journal entries, and the art project, students are able to look into their lives to see what they believe, what questions magical realism allows an author to explore, and overlapping connections between magic and reality.
Differentiation
One of the main ways that I am differentiating instruction in this unit is through the use of book groups. Smaller groups allow students to explore different books that may appeal more to their taste and/or reading level, and it provides a more intimate discussion center that may be more comfortable for some students. However, I am going to have to put the book groups together very strategically. If chosen correctly, it will drastically enhance influences to keep the group moving forward, and to be sure that they are encouraging one another during group discussion and work time. The class will also be doing a variety of full class, group, partner, and individual work throughout the unit that allows for an array of different activities to appeal to different explanations of central ideas. With those activities, students will be able to share thoughts with the entire class through class discussion, they will be able to work in smaller book groups, as well as discover some major ideas individually through journals and the creative writing and art project. One of the major choices that I made when constructing the unit was a more workshop style classroom for writing their short story. I wanted this to be a structured, in class activity to be sure that everyone was making progress, and that I would be available to help students on an individual basis throughout the entire project.
Unit Launch / Hook of Lesson
On the first day of the unit, I will be having a class activity where I write the word “magical” in one column on the board, and the word “realism” in another column. Then, the class will come up with defining aspects/words to describe their understanding of the separate words. This can then move into a discussion about how and if the two can relate, as well as the short mini lesson describing the actual definition of magical realism literature to introduce the unit main ideas. This then allows for questions and discussions about the differences between magical realism and fantasy literature. I find this inquiry approach effective due to the fact that it gets student initially engaged with the content that we will be covering in the unit, and it allows them to attempt to answer a question(s) directly related to the topic. This specific example provides them with two words that they should already be quite familiar, and then combing it to be something that they may have never heard of or experienced before.
Organization of Unit
Example Lessons & Related Materials from Unit Plan
Lesson + Example from Friday of Week 1
UBD "Playing Cards" Lesson Plan | |
File Size: | 42 kb |
File Type: | doc |
Example "Playing Card" | |
File Size: | 79 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Lesson from Monday of Week 3
UBD 1st Book Group Discussion Lesson Plan | |
File Size: | 130 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Questioning Circle & Peer Review Handout
Questioning Circle Handout | |
File Size: | 69 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Peer Review Handout | |
File Size: | 73 kb |
File Type: | docx |