Creative Response to Literature:
Learners "Talk Back" to Literary Writers
To encourage the concept of art as a conversation, I encourage my writing and literature students to "talk back" to their self-selected writers and tell them what their text has meant to the student. My students are given the choices of contacting the writer via email or social media and attaching their analysis essay or reflection or writing a creative response. The creative responses could be a text written in the same genre as the selected literary text, a video, a song, or....Well, the possibilities are wide open.
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Below, you see one student's response to Gene Luen Yang's graphic novel Saints. She didn't like how his novel ended, so she wrote an alternate ending. She drew in his style and added her own text and pictures. She contacted Yang and sent him her ending. He was delighted to connect with this reader. My student later told me that she had never liked to read before and, in fact, hated to read, but that this assignment and Yang's engaging text affirmed her cultural background (like Yang, she is Chinese) and made her fall in love with reading. Yay!
Learner-Centered Reading Graphic Organizers
Reading tools that I've developed to support readers of all levels include reading graphic organizers, precìs paragraphs, and columned reading journals. These formative writing-to-learn tasks put the reader in charge, and they are the experts in their observations. In the first page of the RGO you see here (which the learner completes ahead of class), the reader pulls out key points she noticed, and her insights in the right column detail her thinking process and analysis. At the bottom of the page, the reader writes a note to the author of the text she has analyzed. This activity draws the learner into conversation with the writer, and, voilà! the learner becomes a contributing resident in the Writers' Block.
The learner brings the RGO with the first side completed to class, and in her collaborative group shares what she discovered from the reading. She is the expert of her own insights, and this expertise builds confidence in her own critical reading skills. Once all the members of the group have shared their insights, they work together to create a concept map to illustrate the main points the group learned. After the group has drawn their map, they share their map and findings with the class. This activity makes for a noisy, happy, motivated class, and I couldn't be happier!
