Literature Circles: Decolonizing the High School Canon
Help me give my students access to diverse books: retellings of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
$969 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
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This project is part of the Black History Month celebration because it supports a Black teacher or a school where the majority of the students are Black.
My Project
In this literature circles unit, students will practice comparing and contrasting in order to answer the question: is the high school canon universal, or do the stories that mean to the most of us reflect our own lives and experiences?
Students will investigate how non-white authors reimagine canonical texts such as Frankenstein and Pride & Prejudice through a social justice lens.
In a graphic novel, Frankenstein is reimagined as a grieving mother who uses science to resurrect her murdered son in the wake of police brutality. Similarly, the creature is imagined in a contemporary novel as being composed of the body parts of murdered Iraqi citizens seeking revenge after the War Against Terror.
Similarly, the contemporary retellings of Pride & Prejudice situate Elizabeth Bennet in Brooklyn as an Afro Latina teenager fed up with gentrifiers changing her neighborhood, and as a Pakistani school teacher frustrated by regressive cultural expectation that she must marry to be of value.
Half of students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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