The teaching of canonical novels has been in dispute for at least 30 years and it's unlikely that the arguments will be settled any time in the near future. While I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the idea of a set body of Literature, I recognize that such a thing exists in practice and that my students will be judged on their knowledge of it at some point. So I generally try to teach some canon texts, while attempting to focus my attention less on their transcendent aesthetic perfection or any such elitist garbage. Instead, I like to try to take the supposedly universal themes and link them back to very concrete historical-material realities. Not exactly a novel approach, but one that is important enough to mention again . . .
In this post, I offer an introduction to a 9th grade unit on William Golding's Lord of the Flies, a fantastic text with a very specific historical political message. Unfortunately, this political posture has been blunted by a few decades of teaching about things like "human nature" or light/dark binaries or something equally abstract and unrelatable. Instead, I like to teach it in the context of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Besides focusing on these politicized readings, I highlight the skills of using supporting evidence from the text to back up claims made throughout the unit. That way, the connections don't become stick-on readings that are external to the novel, but help to understand the text and its relationship to current political conditions.
In the first lesson, I show this video and the following video clip from a Democracy Now interview with the head scientist from the experiment, Philip Zimbardo. This lesson sets the general theme, and students explore the ways that people act in abnormal and sometimes atrocious ways, given a change in situations. By the end of the lesson, the seeds are planted for students to see Ralph and Jack's actions on the island as impelled by their authoritarian positions. These seeds are largely the result of the Zimbardo video, which was filmed shortly after the revelation of human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib.
At the end of the day, I give students their copies of Lord of the Flies and assign the first several pages for homework reading with a simple worksheet to keep track of details.
For the second day's lesson, I pull back on the polemic a little, focusing instead on the general roles the characters are adopting. However, students usually begin to see these characters in terms of the context set up by the Stanford Prison Experiment the day before. However, I don't want these to be simply echoed responses so that I'm facilitating a certain understanding of the text that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with Golding's novel. After all, the point is to allow students to develop the skills to see these connections between text and political reality on their own, right? So, I start to focus right away on skills in making claims and backing them up with textual evidence. If students are going to see a connection between Golding and Zimbardo or American imperialist aggression, they're going to have to prove it to me.
From this point on, the unit progresses by building on these initial forms of understanding. Keep asking students what makes these characters change their behaviors so drastically so that readings of the leader figures doesn't stagnate into a simple "Jack's a jerk" or "Piggy's a submissive momma's boy" - these type of responses don't really help beyond the very initial stages. Eventually, students should be able to support a complex claim about how Lord of the Flies and The Stanford Prison Experiment or the Abu Ghraib abuses are rooted in a similar problem (or sometimes students realize that there is a difference in the examples, which is always equally interesting and often reflects the highest level of engagement with the topic).
To further relate this to standards-based or test-prep language, the process of relating seemingly different texts to each other is essentially the skill that is required to answer the New York State English Regents Critical Lens essay. This unit could scaffold an understanding of that essay's form by asking students to write an essay that explains the saying "absolute power corrupts absolutely" or "having someone to blame for your own actions makes doing something terrible a lot easier" using Lord of the Flies and one of the historical examples as support. Since this is basically what the students have done over the course of the unit, it should translate into a fairly good understanding of how the Critical Lens Essay works.
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