Kathleen McInerney
Department of English and Speech, Chicago State University

Course

English 360: Methods of Teaching Literature 6-12 (3 credit hours)

Prerequisites: Admission to the College of Education

Approaches to teaching literature through reading, writing, and nonprint media. Stresses practical development of teaching material.

Description

Creating a sound track for a literary text

This module requires students to engage with a literary text through interpretation by providing a sound track. Each student will be asked to burn a CD, which includes at least three songs that would be appropriate for a film version of the text read. Students may choose their own scenes.

Transferability

This activity is clearly germane with language arts curriculum; it could be used in many areas of the humanities as well. Any class in which content could be imagined (or viewed) as a film or other graphic art could be enhanced through the students' interpreting through and connecting with an event/idea/work and music. Students in American history, for example, reading, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and other accounts of the Wounded Knee Massacre might seek out the music of Joy Harjo's band Honor or other native groups to include in an imagined film of Dee Brown¹s book or after watching documentaries about this event. Students studying the labor movement could choose from the many songs of this period to include in a film about this movement in U.S. history. In an art class, students could choose and present music representing their interpretation of an individual work or artist. Imagining (or watching) a film about Frida Kahlo, or in response to a single work, students could research that period in Mexican history and the cultural/historical context of Kahlo's as well as Diego Rivera's work.