Art, Social Studies, or Creative Writing and The Arrival by Shaun Tan


Lesson Plan: The Arrival by Shaun Tan and Multiculturalism
Teacher: Art, English, or Social Studies teacher
Subject Area: Art, Creative Writing, or Social Studies
Grade: Seventh and Eighth

Name of lesson: Reading the Wordless Text and Multiculturalism

Overview:
The Arrival provides a good impetus for discussions about multiculturalism, pluralism, and diversity in addition to developing interpretation skills. The text offers opportunities to apply multiple critical perspectives to a single text and engaging student discussions.

Description:
Students discuss and learn about multiculturism, pluralism, and diversity
Students

Time needed for lesson:
90 minutes

Procedure:
Lesson one
Teacher gives a visual presentation of The Arrival.

Lesson two
Teacher reads quote from Shaun Tan and asks the students for their opinions. The teacher shows a couple of pages and students practice tuning their fine literacy skills together. Simulates visual literacy. From Shaun Tan’s Essay “PICTURE BOOKS: Who Are They For?”- “This is perhaps what reading and visual literacy are all about - and what picture books are good for - continuing that playful inquiry we began in childhood, of using imagination to find significance and meaning in those ordinary, day-to-day experiences that might otherwise remain unnoticed. The lessons we learn from studying pictures and stories are best applied to a similar study of life in general - people, places, objects, emotions, ideas and the relationships between them all. At it’s most successful, fiction offers us devices for interpreting reality, and imagining how many such interpretations might be possible.”

Lesson three
Students work in small groups looking at a couple of pages from the graphic novel.

Lesson Four
Individually or in small groups students develop their own thematic wordless storyline and put the sketches on a poster board.

Lesson Five
Students present their story posters.

Alternative lesson for Writing and interpretation skills: The Arrival can be used for high school creative writing and senior English classes.  The graphic novel can help teach students how to identify formal literary devices, perspectives (feminist, cultural, historical, Marxist, etc), analyzing themes, et cetera.

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