Lesson ECP-3
Welcome! Please consider how your attitude affects your and other students' experiences of the lesson.
Be respectful, come prepared, and show interest to have the best possible educational experience.
Lesson goals
Learn about the central themes: violence, gender roles and sexuality by reading exerpts, discussing as a group and writing about them.
Lesson activities
Basic: read excerpts
Intermediate: group discussion
Advanced: writing exercise
Basic: read excerpts
Exerpt reading and Quizlet test
Time for the exercises: ~15-20 minutes
Take the Quizlet mini-test. Have fun showing that you learned the theory!
Read the excerpts:
Celie encouraging Harpo to beat Sofia up (pages 35, 36, 38-41)
Shug arrives, lives with Celie and Mr., Celie explores her sexuality (24-27, 42-45)
Intermediate: group discussion
Group discussion
Time for the activity: ~20 minutes
During this exercise you will learn how to read, watch and understand The Color Purple in order to retell the narrative
Together with your classmates, you will assume either the role of summariser, questioner, clarifier or predictor.
Summariser: What happened? What and who were the most important events and characters?
Questioner: What was unclear while reading this part of the book? What do you wonder about?
Clarifier: Explain confusing events or difficult words that you or others might not understand.
Predictor: What do you think will happen next? Why did you come to that conclusion?
You are encouraged to be active to make the text more comprehensible.
You will have have a template to use where you fill out the boxes as you discuss. This helps in practicing your writing skills.
Advanced: writing exercise
Retell the story from The Color Purple
Time for the activity: ~20-30 minutes
This exercise develops your skills at retelling and expanding upon the story from The Color Purple by using postcolonial theory.
The themes are: racism, violence, gender roles, sexuality, colonialism
Word count: 100-150 words
To begin with, briefly retell the story:
This far, what is the The Color Purple about?
Who are the main characters, what are their names and what are they like?
Secondly, use at least one of the points below to expand upon one of the themes:
Where does the story take place? What kind of society is it and how are people treated? #racism
In what way is violence used between the characters? #violence
How are men and women expected to behave and how do they treat each other? #gender roles
How is sexuality either a way to oppress people or a to express liberty? #sexuality
Where can you see examples of how colonialism affected the characters and story? #colonialism
Once done, submit your text to Unikum for feedback.
WAGOLL (What a good one looks like)
Example 1
Alice Walker's epistolary novel The Color Purple is a controversial work about Celie, an abused and uneducated African American woman, and her struggle for empowerment in the early 20th century. In letters, firstly to God, but eventually to her sister, Celie shares her experiences in a world filled with violence.
To begin with, Celie is forced to marry a man whom she refers to as Mr.___. Their relationship lacks love, and Mr.___ rarely hesitates to abuse Celie whenever she does something wrong in his eyes. In order for life to be bearable, Celie constantly must suppress herself, and consequently, she has low self-worth.
Example 2
The Color Purple is a novel written by Alice Walker. The story follows Celie, an African American woman, through her letters to God. Celie suffers a lot at the hands of the man she believes to be her father, who rapes and hits her. She continues to suffer when she is forced to marry a similar man. Her husband does, however, introduce her to Shug Avery, an empowered and independent woman, who is a role model for Celie and eventually becomes her lover. The novel is brutally honest, raw, and emotional. Furthermore, it deals with many important themes such as sexism, racism, religion, and abuse.
One of the most important themes in the book is sexism. Because she is a woman, her husband, Mr. Albert, regards Celie as someone who should take care of his children and household as well as someone he has to control and beat in order to make her do what he wants. This is how most men in the book think of their wives and women in general.
WAPOLL (What a poor one looks like)
Example 1
The author of book "The Color Purple" Alice Walker did a fantastic job writing the book that´s so powerful as well as emotional, not many writers can do that. Walker writes about a young woman that together with her sister go through a traumatic upbringing that includes abuse of all sorts such as sexual, emotional, physical as well as verbal. She also wirtes about how colonialism in all it´s forms have changed the sisters life in addition to the rest of the colored peoples life.
To being with I´m going to summerize the book, so in the begining of the book we get to read how Celie the main character handels the obsticlas that are trown on her from childhood. As a child Celie was both raped, physicaly asulted by her adopted father.
Example 2
The book Color Purple, writtwn by Alice Walker, introduces the reader to the young African American woman Celie and her Life in the first half of 1900. Troughout the book Walker brings upp important topics like racism, discrimination and abuse.
The author describes Celie as a girl who needed to grow up quick. She lives with her sister Nettie and her Pa, who is raping her. Celie ending up having two kids with her Pa. She gets told that the kids died but that wasn't the truth. The truth was that her Pa gave them up for adoption. After her preganicies she wasn't allowed to got to school anymore. Instead her father forced her to marry a man named Mr_____. Mr_____ is not a good husband, he beats Cellie and he is constantly mean.
Homework
Repeat the theory as needed.
Exit ticket
My impressions so far are ...