Surrealism.doc (Size: 433 KB / Downloads: 6)
One of the problems I identified very early in my #teacherthuglife was the lack of critical literacy skills in today's "readers". For the purpose of teaching critical literacy, a reader is anyone who receives a text, and a text is not necessarily written e.g. a movie is a text, an advertisement, a painting, etc. It became apparent very quickly that while the literal and obvious meaning is reached fairly easily, today's reader seems to have forgotten that there are connotations and figurative possibilities beyond the surface. This is the same deficit that has allowed Rupert Murdoch to take over the world: "let's believe everything that we already agree with and want to be true."To combat this, I used surrealism and absurdism. Neither of these "schools", if you will, are meaningless -- but they are definitely an antidote to the need to find one single and absolute meaning. They require significant input from the reader. To scaffold, a reading of a text (paintings first, then poems) is broken up into elements (what IS there, what are the actual things that you can identify -- not what they mean, what they ARE) and mood (what does it make you feel like/ remind you of?). In breaking paintings and poems down like this, students are able to put elements together to build their own meanings, and no two are ever identical. If they find they have identified an element that then jars with the meaning they've come up with, usually without prompting they will go back and rethink their interpretation to see how it changes.
All things being equal, I have attached the task to see if that assists anyone.