Sing to Me: Building Community with Homer's The Odyssey
engaging all learners with complex texts
During one of the coldest winters in St. Paul, Minnesota, we traveled from Providence to offer a professional development workshop for the district’s teachers. The focus was “making complex texts accessible.” We chose one of the most complicated texts we could think of—Speak, Memory by Nabokov—and built a workshop around it to demonstrate to adults how repeated encounters with a difficult text can lead to deep understanding. When we arrived on the day of the workshop, the teachers had invited students to join as well. One teacher explained that many of these students “struggled with reading.” Just to give a sense of the text’s lexical density, it begins:
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth.
Our team huddled on the side of the room to discuss what to do. Do we change the text to something easier? Do we split the group? We had already planned the session and decided to move forward with Nabokov. Participants engaged in a variety of activities in which they interpreted phrases, performed passages, and collaboratively analyzed the text. At the end of the workshop, one of the students said, “Now I really want to read the whole book!”
Getting students excited about seemingly obscure or “impossible” texts has always been at the core of my teaching. When I taught English Language Learners in Mexico, we read Shakespeare’s The Tempest, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Invisible Man. One of the primary approaches we developed at our school Habla to support students through these works is what we call “turning the text.” After studying a particular passage, monologue, or poem, we take one line from it and use it as a prompt. That line becomes a structure, a sentence starter, or a question for students to write their own response. Using the opening of The Odyssey, I’ll describe ways we engage students in reading the text and responding to it with a “turning the text” approach.
Break It Down
Shakespeare and Company, a theater group based in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, has a robust educational outreach program focused on “immersing students in the world of Shakespeare.” One of their primary techniques is to get Shakespeare’s words immediately into students’ voices and bodies. They give short excerpts to small groups and ask them to “bring them to life.” From phrases, they move to monologues, with four or five students performing a single monologue collaboratively. This all happens before students have even read the play.
The effect is powerful: students feel immediately successful with the text. These embodied, collaborative experiences become a bridge into reading the larger work.
