Module Introduction

The rationale for this unit of study is to deepen and strengthen students’ meta-cognitive abilities when examining and analyzing complex texts. Explicit strategies that “good” readers employ when making meaning with regards to complex texts include, but are not limited to: summarizing, questioning, clarifying, predicting/inferring, as well as a variety of clean up strategies when comprehension breaks down (i.e. re-reading, identifying and defining unfamiliar vocabulary, sourcing the struggle, isolating subject and verb of a complex sentence frame, etc). Research has shown the explicit instruction of specific routines and skills are requisite in order to facilitate optimal performance in terms of students’ reading comprehension.

As a practical application, this unit has been designed to help students recognize the rule of the interpretive game as it relates to a determination of whether or not a narrator (or character for that matter) can be considered reliable. Students will be introduced to the notion of unreliability via artifacts that are intended to activate students’ background knowledge and schema. Drawing on the work of Carol Lee, “the aim of cultural modeling is to facilitate students’ learning generative concepts in academic subject matters by helping them to make connections between the target knowledge and forms of knowledge they have constructed from their home and community experiences” (4). Within this construct, the alignment of academic task and everyday practices of students are integral. In order to give voice for students to disclose their own experiences, cultural models were developed as a result of an inquiry-based approach, where students informed the selection of materials used for the opening sequence of activities to launch the unit (i.e. an episode of “Martin,” the “Boondocks” cartoon, and the “True Story of the Three Pigs”).

In the selection of materials for the transition to academic texts, it was felt an author study of Edgar Allen Poe would afford students multiple opportunities to apply the construct of unreliable narrator in such a way as to promote intertextuality. Given the complexity of reading level, using texts by Poe also lent themselves to similarity in language structure, theme, and literary devices, as well as a dramatized first person narrative perspective. Given that reality, applying the criteria of unreliability seems to be a medium by which the texts can be organized. Narrators are considered unreliable (or reliable, for that matter) by the appropriation of six criteria as cited by Michael Smith* (1991): Self-Interest, Experience, Knowledge, Morality, Emotionality, and Inconsistency.