Last week we considered how to look at a text by examining how a camera works. (An idea that I had been thinking about and was developed when I read about work that another teacher had done with his class.)
We discussed how we saw more and more detail about the boy as the camera zoomed in. In the ECU shot, we were able to even make out his expression and make our judgements about his character. However when we considered what this image conveyed on its own, we realised that without zooming back out we wouldn’t have all the information we needed.
We then applied this to our text and considered how in order to analyse and evaluate what was happening we needed to have a wide focus and then zoom in to chapter, page, sentence and finally word level (ECU) to capture all the information. At this point, we then needed to zoom all the way back out again and use our knowledge to link to the wider context (the social, historical, political and moral background).
We used this to look at an extract on Crooks and realised how much information on the wider context of prejudice, could be gleaned from focusing on a few words.
We will be working on this technique together in the run up to the CA, but give it a try yourself – practice makes perfect!
React!