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Fantastic Stories of the Environment

Program Area

This activity can be used as a mini short story unit in the Grade 9 Language class and the grade 10 English class. It is well suited to the senior curriculum, especially in the E.S.L. curriculum. It can also be used in part as independent activities to complement specific themes or cross-curricular activities with other Program Areas or Subjects.

Learning Outcomes

Teaching, learning and evaluation will focus on the student’s ability to:

  • Decode themes which have an impact on the environment in short works of fiction.
    Classroom Development
  • Give students a chance to learn that short stories offer opportunities for the exploration of environmentally relevant themes. Elicit responses from students, in the manner of a ‘brain-storming’ session, examples of environmental ideas or situations that they have found in short stories that they have read previously. Compile a list of student responses on the board. They may suggest aspects of movies (The Toxic Avenger), comic books (Swamp Thing), cartoons (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles).
  • Explain to the students how the short story is a medium which allows a reader to explore specific ideas, themes, situations, relationships in a fictional manner, where it can be safely viewed apart from ‘reality.’ Short stories tend to focus on a particular conflict or experience and, as such, they sometimes ignore the requirements of a novel to explore character development, setting, and complex plots.
  • Assign students to specific groups which are intended to focus on, discuss, précis, and present a particular text. There are eight texts included here of widely differing levels of difficulty, so that the destreamed class can be organized according to reading levels or in a homogeneous manner.
  • Students are directed to read all texts, discuss their texts with the group to develop a list of the environmentally relevant aspects, and write an individual environmental précis. This précis should take the form of a description of the environmentally relevant aspects or attitudes found in these texts. Students should then meet to discuss and compile their work into one group précis. This product will be presented to the class and included in an ‘annotated bibliography’ described below. Useful extensions of this activity includes independent reading and book reports intended to supplement the annotated bibliography. Students should be directed to search out short stories, and possibly works in various fictional media, read them, and describe in a paragraph or two the suitability of the texts for study in this unit. This material would supplement the class produced annotations of the texts studied in class.
  • Have students choose another text out of the list. In their writing folders students should describe their personal response at being placed in the ‘shoes’ of the protagonist. Place the following questions on the board to aid in the personal response: How would they feel or act in this situation? What solutions would they choose? Why would they choose them?
  • First, draw upon the wealth of student knowledge that students have unconsciously picked up from exposure to popular media. Let them know that you feel that what they bring to the class is as valid as what they learn in class.

Quiz Questions

On separate occasions students can be given the opportunity to respond in class to the following quiz questions. Students should be given the questions in advance and even be allowed to discuss the questions in advance with peers. These questions are difficult, and perhaps beyond the level of difficulty usually encountered by students at this stage. Therefore they should develop answers in groups but present them individually.

  • In the “Word of Unbinding,” Festin can be seen as a steward of the environment. What about Voll’s role? Describe Festin’s role and contrast it with Voll’s role in the story.
  • In Dragon Magic & “Rule of Names,” how the humans interact with Dragons depend on their cultural background. Choose one interaction on which to focus and analyze why the human acts they way he or she does.
  • In “The Garbage Collector,” the protagonist is a man faced with a fundamental change in his attitude to life, society and his profession. Describe, in the form of a personal journal entry, how you would react if you were either the husband or the wife.
  • “The Summer Witch” and “The Word of Unbinding” present protagonists who experience nature in a way in which we never can. Choose one part of nature—element, plant or animal—and describe how you would see our society from this new perspective.

Evaluation

Evaluation for class work should be based on task dedication, contribution to the group and the learning of others, and the group’s willingness to compromise, as well as a formal evaluation of the final product. The quizzes can be evaluated as the teacher sees fit, depending on the students’ writing skills and knowledge base. Independent work and creative response should be graded on a pass/fail basis to encourage students to take risks and experiment. Failure would be dependent on the student’s unwillingness to extend personal horizons. Make success dependent on creative thinking skills, where possible.

Background Information

A short annotated bibliography of selected short stories is included here both as material for the activity and as an example of how the student’s “Annotated Bibliography” project might be presented. The following texts are representative and widely available. The teacher is encouraged to both modify this list and elicit student addition of texts.
Bradbury, Ray. “The April Witch.” In The Golden Apples of the Sun. New York: Bantam Books, 1961.

This story, like “The Word of Unbinding” below, describes an intimate contact with the sights and smells of nature and the beings found therein. Both texts provide excellent contrasts of experiences, especially as the protagonists are respectively female and male. Be sure to highlight, for discussion, the gender stereotyping whereby both characters act out of love; the female strives for the ‘love’ of a person while the male strives to protect the land that he ‘loves.’

Bradbury, Ray. “The Garbage Collector.” In The Golden Apples of the Sun. New York: Bantam Books, 1961.
This very short story lends itself to discussions of trash and environmentally catastrophic events. “The Garbage Collector” is a powerful story describing how the trash collector might have to deal with the fallout of an atomic explosion. It provides a meaningful contrast between the traditional ‘trash man’ and the modern ‘waste disposal technician.’

Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Rule of Names.” In The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. New York: Bantam Books, 1975.
This is another dragon fantasy, though in a non-specified cultural context which is a suitable companion for Dragon Magic. This text also deals with the power that comes with the knowledge of ‘names.’

Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Word of Unbinding.” In The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. New York: Bantam Books, 1975.
This is an overtly environmental tale which places the wizard Festin, a steward of the land, against Voll the Fell, an inhuman force which ravages the land and its inhabitants. This text is worth being dealt with in depth to illustrate how the physical setting of a story becomes both an environmental battleground and the prize for which Festin is willing to give all.

Norton, Andre. Dragon Magic. New York: Ace Books, 1980.
This text focuses on the richness that comes with the sharing of multicultural experiences. Dragon Magic is actually a novel in four parts in which four youths independently encounter mythical figures from their own cultural past through the completion of four dragon puzzles found in an abandoned house. They become friends through the sharing of these personal experiences. Germanic, African, Celtic and Chinese historical episodes contract differing views towards this common mythical creature. This text can be assigned to four students/groups for study and presentation.

Timing

Independent bibliography assignment. One period, broken down into 20 min to explain the activity, and 40 min of class time in a later period to work on the paragraph(s). Time provided for the compilation of the annotations should also include time for text entry and DTP activity, whether it is a cross-curricular activity in a keyboarding class, or done in the language/English/ESL class. Ensure that this activity includes a quick lesson on the proper form for documenting sources that is advocated by your school/board.

Cross-disciplinary Links

Keyboarding classes are encouraged to participate in the ‘Annotated Bibliography’ project by compiling the précis, and perhaps also performing the Desk Top Publishing duties. Art classes can provide illustrations suitable for the ‘Annotated Bibliography’ project and advanced art classes may be able to bind the text as a book. Senior level English classes should be enlisted to assist with the editing and proofreading of the text.

Student Instruction Guide

Introduction

This activity will require you to keep an open mind, especially if you are a ‘good’ English student. You’ll be looking at literature from a new perspective; an environmental perspective. Instead of describing the plot, characters, crisis, and falling action, you’ll have the opportunity to explore environmental themes and attitudes. You will be expected to read a variety of texts and compile an “annotated bibliography” of the texts.


Process

  • In groups, read the assigned text and précis the aspects of the text which appear to be environmentally focused. Your group should agree on the wording of one description and make sure that each of you has a copy of the précis in your notebook or writing folder.
  • Jigsaw into a new group and share what your original group discovered with the new group. Ask questions to clarify the other’s précis if it is not clear.
  • Using either the resource centre in your school or a list provided by your teacher, choose another short story on which to repeat the first two steps.
  • In your writing folder or response journal describe how you would feel if placed in the “shoes” of a protagonist in one of the stories that you have précised.

Follow-up

  • As the final step in this activity, all of your précis can be compiled into a single “annotated bibliography.” You and your classmates can choose the format. Check existing “annotated bibliographies” in your school library for examples of proper format.
  • Your completed work should be presented to the library for inclusion in your school’s reference collection of environmental materials. In the future, other classes will be able to build on your work or use it as reference material for other projects. You may wish to offer your annotated bibliography to your local public library to supplement its reference materials, or even forward a copy to the “Merril Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy” run by the Toronto Public Library. The Merril Collection is Canada’s top reference collection of speculative fiction and it may be able to use your work.