Using Lenses for Literary Criticism

One of my favorite teaching books is Deborah Appleman's Critical Encounters in High School English. Her book lays out how to get high school students started on literary criticism by using different "lenses" to focus on gender, race, or class.

I won't get into the nuts and bolts about how easy it is to get students to use lenses because it's all in the book. Suffice it to say, it is very easy to get kids to start doing literary analyses from perspectives based in different structures of social power, either on texts or real-world situations. They pretty much know it all, they just need to be given the language to describe what they see and feel.

I'd used lenses very successfully when student teaching a Language Arts class at a high school of relative privilege with mostly white, middle-class students. When I got thrown a sheltered (designed for ELLs) Language Arts class at my poorer school, I was excited to get back to the lenses.

This is the reference handout that students get for using lenses, including Reader Response.

This is an example of the handouts they get to use lenses to respond to/analyze the book we're reading, in this case, Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street.

The only lens that I used while student teaching that I haven't introduced in my current class is a Post-Colonial lens we worked with while reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Finally, here are some of the comments students have made using lenses...
“Money always matters with people—with money you can do anything you want. With this story they need money to take care of their children.” - Nam
“Mothers are important because they take of the babies. Money is important because the babies have to eat.” - Tania
“The poor always have a dream. They want to have money to save their life from being poor.” - Nam
“Poor people have more rules than rich people. Rich people can't do whatever they want.” - Karen
“A house with so many mice—poor families always face a lot of struggles and challenges every day.” - Nhung
“If you have money, you can support your family...Women who are rich can study anything they want, but poor people have to take care of their families.” - Erika
“She wants to get a better life than her mom. She doesn't care how hard it is.” - Anh Tuan
“...because women have to be submissive.” - Tania
“The girl wants to change her life, fight with “gender.” She wants a good job.” - Thinh