At some point over the past few weeks, all Class II English students were introduced to a change in the unit centered around Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (TFA). In past years, students have read all three parts of the book before writing an essay on it, which coincided with the busy end of the first quarter. This year, juniors will watch Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (BP) after reading only the first two parts of TFA, and then analyze a brief one to two-minute scene, focusing on the positioning and angles, mise-en-scène, characters, and composition of each frame. Thereafter, students will connect the scene’s themes to TFA – all in a five to ten-minute Screencastify recording. After finishing up the third part of TFA, the final essay will be due at the beginning of quarter two, thereby mitigating students’ workloads during the infamous crunch period at the end of quarter one.
Students are generally excited about this change, as it means that the end of the quarter will be less stressful than expected. “TFA is a very interesting book. There’s a lot to analyze. It’s just that chapters can be really long and intense, and especially as you need to annotate them with a high level of attention to detail, it can take over an hour just to get through one chapter,” Orlaith McDonagh (Class II) said. “[Taking a break from TFA] is giving me a chance to catch up in some of my other classes.”
In addition to reducing end-of-quarter anxiety, the assignment teaches students to analyze alternative media. English Department Chair Jessica Brennan said, “I think what the scene analysis does is it allows you to broaden out the definition of reading. [It] teaches you how to apply textual analytical skills to film. That seems like a worthy endeavor to me, and there was general interest [among English faculty].”
The BP scene analysis assignment is not actually a sudden change implemented for the first time this year. English Faculty Dave Liebowitz has been “test driving” the assignment for the past two years with his own students. Given its success, the rest of the English II faculty will be adopting the assignment into their own classes for the first time this year. “[Film analysis] seemed like something that would benefit a broader group,” Brennan said.
Former English Faculty Patrick Toomey actually tested the assignment last year as well, but incorporated the Heart of Darkness unit into the scene analysis along with TFA. What remained constant across all sections over the past two years, though, was the choice of BP as the subject of analysis. “I chose BP in part because I felt like there were a lot of resonances that exist between it and TFA,” Liebowitz said. He noted that the film is set in an Afrofuturistic, fictional, Atlantis-esque metropolis, untouched by colonization. In contrast, TFA is set in a fictional Igbo village in Nigeria at the moment of white contact. However, he identifies a few key similarities between the two pieces. “There are some really interesting pieces thematically. There are resonances in terms of generational cycles and relationships between sons and fathers. I thought that the triangulation of Killmonger, T’Challa, and Okonkwo offers a lot of interesting analysis about responses to change, to the past, and to the future,” Liebowitz said.
The assignment trial model, in which one teacher tests out an assignment for a few years before the rest of the English faculty adopts it, is a common way the English department modifies its curriculum. However, the department is careful to ensure that the trial model does not detract from a general sense of homogeneity across English classes, along with assignments completed on mostly concurrent timelines. “We believe in a common experience across a grade level,” Brennan said. “We are reading the same books at about the same time, and we also think very hard about equity.”
That said, there is still some flexibility afforded to teachers, allowing them some freedom in what they teach. “We try to make sure that the subject matter fits the class. You want assignments to fit the spirit of the class. There have been times when my class hasn’t been as keen on certain topics and hasn’t gone in the same direction as some of my other classes have.” Brennan said.
Other English II teachers are eager to try the assignment, given that students will have the opportunity to interpret films, which is unconventional for an English class. English Faculty Kimberly Libby Genecco said, “It’s exciting for me to do something different. I think the dynamic part of education is you try things and you see how it goes.”
That said, some articulate concerns about the choice of film. Abi Afagla (Class II) said, “I don’t think that BP was the best movie to watch alongside TFA. I feel like there are more relevant films, like Half of a Yellow Sun, [which] was directly inspired by Achebe’s work, and it is centered around the Nigerian Civil War. The fact that there are movies available that literally share the same concepts, symbols, and themes as TFA, while BP takes place in a society that does not exist, upsets me.”
Afagla foresees the assignment being difficult to complete, as she will have to draw strained parallels between the two pieces. “I think it’s very hard to compare two things that take place in two completely different chronological eras, especially since one of them doesn’t even exist. There’s no factual foundation to Wakanda,” Afagla said. “I don’t know if BP was chosen because it was the most accessible and well-known choice. I think the choice of BP may have been because of a lack of information or a lack of knowledge about Nigerian and West African films.”
Regardless of how strongly BP was connected to the TFA unit, the scene analysis assignment was well-received by English II teachers and some students. Its unusual nature sparked students’ curiosity and ultimately pushed them to access their analytical skills in new ways.
