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

Compare and Contrast: Gender

Since we were talking about gender in Language Arts, I decided it might be a good time to ease my ELD students into some gender exploration as well. Our current target is Compare and Contrast. Here's how the class went...

Language Objective: I will say and write sentences that compare and contrast toy ads using important C&C vocabulary
Learning Objective: I will consider (think about) the ways companies use gender to sell toys





(1) Read the objectives for the day. Explain "ads" and "advertisements."
(2) Break students into groups of 3, with mixed languages as much as possible.
(3) Explain that we'll be writing sentences that compare and contrast toy ads that show boys and toy ads that show girls.
(4) Gender recap: Since all the students don't have Language Arts with me, I wrote up "sex" and "gender" and went over the differences between those.
(5) Give each group a couple pages of toy ads (Fred Meyer, Target, Toys R Us). These are easy to find, they are always among those sheets and sheets of ads in newspapers.
(6) Tell students we need to come up with a list of words that we will probably use when we're writing about these ads. Get them started with "feminine," "masculine," , "maternal," "girly..." then each group has to pick two words and add them to the list. Our lists ended up including things like dolls, cars, cooking, weapons, guns, violent, cute, pretty, tough, and creative.
(7) Put up a sentence frame. Each group has one sheet of paper and needs to complete the sentence frame together with one person writing.
(8) Call on groups for 3-4 examples for each sentence frame, then move to the next one.
(9) In the end, I asked if anyone wanted to put their ad on the doc cam and share anything they saw, and a couple groups did have some more things to say.

When I redo this, I will try to get more speaking practice in before the groups write, or make them do some "Give One, Get One," type things where they move around the room and actually have to speak.

Here are some sentences groups came up with using the sentence frames, I won't correct anything:

These blue toys encurage boys to masculine, whereas those pink toys encurage grils to feminine.

The toys that are shown with boys are weapons and cars whereas the toys shown with girls tend to be about beautty or babbies.

The toys that are shown with the boys are powerful and masculine, whereaes the toys shown with girls tend to be feminine and cute.

These weapon toys encourage boys to be violent, whereas those fantasy toys encourage girls to imagine.

The advertisements for girls toys have to do with how to pet a dogs; however, the advertisement for boys toys are about heroes and cars.

The advertisements for girls toys are home aplaneses [appliances]; however, the advertisements for boys toys are game, car, and killing zombies. P.S. Thes toys are very sexist.

It was a pretty fun day. For tomorrow, I've typed up some of the sentences with common mistakes for us to practice correcting.

The hard thing about having a target that guides your curriculum is that you have so many amazing topics that you could be using. Other great Compare and Contrast units could be built around guiding questions about racism, social services/taxes in different countries, sustainability, indigenous issues and colonization...the list could go on and on. The hardest part is focusing your topic enough that students get repeated practice with the same group of academic vocabulary words.