Postcolonialism is a theoretical framework that analyzes the political, social, cultural, and historical impact of European colonization through the 19th and 20th centuries. Postcolonial literature, bodies of texts written by citizens of formerly colonized countries, typically navigates their experience contending with the aftereffects of colonization, ranging from hybridity and identity, loss of culture or language, and erasure of history.
Orientalism is a postcolonial lens coined by Edward Said, a cultural intellectual and one of the founders of postcolonial theory. It specifically concerns the attitude with which the West portrays the East. Based on his analysis of 19th century Western scholarship, Said concluded that the East - or the Orient, as it was once referred to - was often captured and framed as exotic, uncivilized, and primitive. These portrayals were not only how the West justified colonialism back then, but still inform how we understand the East today.
Critical literacy is a learning approach where students examine texts with attention to how the messages uphold certain power structures or privileges a particular perspective. When students read with a critical eye, they are able to expose the ideologies being reinforced by that text and understand how that ideology may be presenting an incomplete image of reality.
Visual/media literacy is based on the tenets of critical literacy and refers to the ability to interpret and make meaning of messages in images. Much of the information that students are exposed to is distributed digitally; their ability to “read” images with a critical lens will provide them with the skills to evaluate the validity behind the messages they are constantly inundated with in their lives.
Anticipation Guide:
This is a set of blanket statements related to themes or ideas broached in the novel, which students are then asked to either agree or disagree and include a rationale for their choice. These guides are a useful pre-reading strategy for activating students' prior knowledge and gets them to think through their opinions or assumptions about some of the topics they will encounter as they engage with the text. Since many students are likely entering these novels with predisposed ideas about the Middle East, this is a helpful tool for generating some preliminary discussion about where their beliefs stem from. Some students may even make personal connections to the statements and may realize that their experiences are not so different from the characters in these texts. To track how students' opinions have changed over the course of their reading, this activity can also be administered at the end of the text as a post-reading protocol.
Gallery Walk:
This protocol invites students to examine a series of images related to the text, such as a time period or historical event. The activity is typically accompanied by a discussion question ("What do you notice or wonder?") for students to synthesize information from the images. Like the anticipation guide, it is a pre-reading strategy designed to activate students' prior knowledge, but is especially helpful for building critical literacy skills because it encourages them to talk through assumptions they make solely based on photographs and even reveal some misconceptions.
KWL Chart:
This protocol asks students: What I know, What I want to Learn, and What I Learned, . These questions help students access what they know--or believe they know--about a topic before they read, consider what they're interested in learning more about as they read, and then think through what they have learned once they finish reading. This is a useful strategy for getting students to track how their knowledge has changed over the course of they're reading and then to critically consider some of the potential inconsistencies between their pre-reading and post-reading knowledge.
Think-Pair-Share:
This protocol promotes collaborative inquiry and listening among small groups. Students are given time to read a short text on their own, think through their response, and then share their thoughts with their group members. This protocol is usually facilitated with discussion questions, which help generate topics of conversation and point students to particular parts of a text that they should pay close attention to. Most of the sample lessons provided in this curriculum use the think-pair-share protocol.
Character Body Bibliography:
This activity asks students to create a visual representation of the traits that make up a character's personality. Students create a body outline of one of the character's in the text, collect a series of quotes that showcases aspects of their identity, and strategically place the quotes on parts of the body that align with the character trait (quotes that demonstrate the character's emotions might go near the heart). Students can also include quotes that reflect how other people in the text perceive the character or track changes the character goes through over time. This strategy is especially helpful for books featuring racial or ethnic characters because assumptions about these groups are typically based on physical traits. In this way, students can juxtapose their visual representations with the characters' personality traits and reflect on how images can sometimes be misleading.
Socratic Seminar:
This is a protocol for student-led discussions about their reading experience. In a traditional socratic seminar, some students are in the "inner circle" participating in the discussion, while the rest of the students are in the "outer circle" monitoring the discussion and assessing the interactions. It provides a space for students to collectively theorize about the book, share their thoughts and consider different perspectives, and talk through wonderings. The strategy is usually accompanied by a series of discussion questions that students use as jumping-off points, but their subsequent discussion does not need to abide by the questions.
For more information and additional protocols, visit EL Education: Classroom Protocols