Feminist perspective essay assignment
The critical artifact analysis section of this essay will focus on student writing for the final essay of this unit, and so I will describe this assignment below. Students read Angela Carter's postmodern, feminist retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, "The Company of Wolves" independently first. They completed reading summaries in which they were asked to select passages with the Review: Comment function in Word, summarize the plot, and apply one concept from the feminist perspective chart per passage in their comment.
They next met in groups and participated in literature circles in which they discussed relevant quotes (see the quote on the right), answered questions about the story, and debated possible interpretations of the story. After working in literature circles for a few days, we discussed the story as a class before beginning to draft the essay, especially the concept of ambiguity as a foundation for the story. I eased them into the essay in this way to avoid imparting my personal opinions and interpretations before they had a chance to develop their own take on the story. |
To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case. To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case – that is, to be killed. This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman.
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This topic [is] meaningful to my life because I don't have freedom and I feel her pain. -Kiana (Artifact #10)
This seemed successful: at the beginning of their group work, students seemed frustrated and confused by the story, but they quickly settled into spirited debate and worked out a fairly sophisticated understanding of the story in their written group work. For instance, I taught this story in the past to undergraduates, who were consistently confused by the ending of the story, especially whether the little girl was in danger or in control. They frequently had trouble distinguishing if she is dead or asleep at the end of the story. This was an initial topic of conversation in the lit circles, but without my intervention, students shortly worked out an interpretation of the ending and message of the story consistent with the textual evidence they discussed; I consider their autonomy here a great success, as I have been attempting to find ways to encourage this all year.
Mr. Ford requested that I organize the essay assignment similarly to the student's last essay. In that essay, they were asked to analyze Marquez's story "One of These Days" by organizing their claims around the following three questions: What does the dentist desire? (Using Maslow's hierarchy of needs); What is blocking his desire? (Using Freudian symbolic analysis of the story); and How/to what extent does he achieve his desire? I thus assigned students to answer the following three focusing questions for their essay on "The Company of Wolves":
Mr. Ford requested that I organize the essay assignment similarly to the student's last essay. In that essay, they were asked to analyze Marquez's story "One of These Days" by organizing their claims around the following three questions: What does the dentist desire? (Using Maslow's hierarchy of needs); What is blocking his desire? (Using Freudian symbolic analysis of the story); and How/to what extent does he achieve his desire? I thus assigned students to answer the following three focusing questions for their essay on "The Company of Wolves":
- What does the main character want? (using Maslow's hierarchy of needs)
- What is blocking her from getting what she wants? (using the feminist perspective chart)
- How does she navigate this challenge and to what degree does she get what she wants?
Students were supplied with these questions, model topic sentences answering these questions, the feminist perspective chart, a modified version of Maslow's hierarchy (right), and an outline and templates for each body paragraph. These templates were created as graphic organizers with room for student writing within the template. I taught mini lessons on each step of essay writing, and each day I collected student writing and integrated it into the lesson for the next day, along with my own models for writing, to point out what worked and what needed revision.
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Above right: Mr. Ford's version of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
Below: Sample body paragraph template for the feminist perspective essay
Below: Sample body paragraph template for the feminist perspective essay