brynnerebelehenry

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/banned-books/

Context & Audience:

This lesson plan has been designed to be taught in high school and college classes and community arts centers.

Implementation:

The format is flexible and can fit into a three-hour class, two one-and-a-half hour sessions, or the exercise can be broken down into four parts: the erasure and discussion, making the collage, the public component, and the class discussion.

Materials Needed:

Sharpies + red pens (1 per each student)

Paper (+ access to a printer)

2 poster-boards

Glue sticks or tape

1 pair of scissors

Goals: This is a demonstrative lesson that draws on the conceptual framework of Freire’s Theater of the Oppressed. The class is designed to let participants reclaim their own stories by creating a collaborative story.

Lesson/Facilitation Plan:

One week before class: participants will be provided with the following resources: PBS Storied, Harvard Library Guide to Banned Books, History, and Censored Texts (and the pages within it) and the Library of Congress digital collection of governmental/historical texts. Participants choose and email the instructor/s a 3-page extract from a banned book or story that they feel is important or relevant to themes or issues they have special investment in. The instructor/s will print out two copies of the selections ahead of class.

The class is designed engage with oppression and erasure in two ways: by using redaction to reclaim and subvert censorship by reconstructing redacted work to make a new narrative, and By recreating oppression through redacting all non-challenged elements of a story and creating a new narrative using only the censored text.

Session 1:

The class will begin with a conversation on Benjamin Graves definition of Derrida’s Deconstruction.

Students will discuss examples of poetic work that address oppression and erasure through varied processes by reading extracts and reviews of Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, Nicole Sealey’s The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, Zong! As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng by M. NourbeSe Philip, and Travis Macdonald’s The O Mission Repo (free download of the full book here).

30 minutes: Using the sharpies provided, the participants will make an erasure by blocking out all the challenged speech and content (overview of what is challenged most frequently here: https://libguides.butler.edu/c.php?g=34189&p=217686).

On their second copy of their texts, students can erase everything but the challenged text, using the red pen to underline the text that is personally significant to them or that represents contested topics.

15-20 minute debrief: The class will then turn in the texts to be laid out altogether. The class will look at the erasures as a group: each person’s chosen text will remain anonymous unless they otherwise expressly state that they don’t want it to be. There will then be a group discussion on the nature of inequality.

Questions to ask the participants include:

Looking at the pages, is it clear that some stories have had more taken away than others?

What stories, if any, were left unchallenged, and which narratives were taken away almost completely?

Do you think differently about your intersecting identities, relationships, experiences, and right to tell your own stories after this?

Looking at the pages where only the unchallenged text was erased, what remains? What does what remains say?

This conversation will be intended to provide an opportunity for participants to reflect on privilege, narrative, and whose stories are told. The exercise is designed to show the experience of oppression and who gets their narrative erased.

After the discussion concludes, the lesson will pivot to considering ways to counteract oppression. Drawing from Theater of the Oppressed, the class will focus on ways to reconstruct narrative and divert/reenact the experience of oppression. Two options will be provided (option two is geared to a smaller class, though both could fit depending on the size of the group and dynamic present).

Option 1:

Participants will be instructed to take the censored text and use the words left uncensored (or even the censored text cut into shapes or repurposed any way they like) and work in a group to reclaim their voices by making a new story through collaging the found texts on a piece of poster-board.

Option 2:

The other option is that all participants will choose a line from the texts provided and place the lines in envelopes to be shuffled then drawn randomly like an Exquisite Corpse to create a story.

Option 3:

Participants can construct a collage piece using only the censored work.

After making the story, the participants will debrief with a 15-minute conversation.

Questions to ask participants include:

Did you feel like you got to reclaim what was taken from your narrative and make a new story?

Why, or why not?

Was the experience of having to make a new piece with the remaining words and texts from the erasure empowering or disempowering?

How, why?

Looking at the poster now, how do you feel?

Session 2:

Sharing their work: It is important for the class to have a choice about who they approach to discuss their project with. Depending on the class size and environment, the class will have two options:

Option 1:

Present their narrative reconstruction and initiate a conversation with 1 or 2 people outside of school (there is no specification for who, how, or where) and take notes on the differing reactions and responses to their project. Participants will take a photo of the text, and be instructed to ask the conversation partner of their choosing about the piece (here, participants are strongly encouraged to come up with their own questions and framing for how they approach this conversation). For a 1-session class, the notes and takeaways from the conversation can be emailed to the group, uploaded on Blackboard, or sent to the instructor/s, depending on format.

Option 2:

This option works best in schools or an arts center, and fits well with either a multi-session class or one longer session.

Participants will put the poster board up next to a blank poster board with sharpies and pens in a public educational space (in a study lounge, school library, hall outside the classroom) for people to anonymously respond to. The class chooses how they want to display their piece and for how long (for example: displaying it in a study room during lunch hour, or leaving it up for one day and then returning to gather the materials).

The participants will engage in public pedagogy by taking note of the reactions—positive, negative, or lack thereof—that the piece elicited and have a final 15-minute conversation on their findings before the session ends.

Primary in-class resources:

PBS Storied: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpKqRC-9Avc

Harvard Library Guide to Banned Books, History, and Censored Texts (and the resources and lists within it): https://guides.library.harvard.edu/c.php?g=1269000&p=9306840

Library of Congress free digital collections: https://www.loc.gov/discover/

The O Mission Repo by Travis Macdonald:

https://fact-simile.blogspot.com/2009/09/o-mission-repo-free-online.html

https://www.under-erasure.com/artists-writers/travis_macdonald/

Review of Whereas by Layli Long Soldier: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/interrogation-transmigration-layli-long-soldiers-whereas-mai-der-vangs-afterland

Review of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by Nicole Sealey: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/31/the-ferguson-report-an-erasure-nicole-sealey-poem

Benjamin Graves definition of Derrida’s Deconstruction: https://www.postcolonialweb.org/poldiscourse/spivak/deconstruction.html

Rey Chow, “Reading Derrida on Being Monolingual”: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20058066

Zong! As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng by M. NourbeSe Philip: https://engleskaknjizevnostodrenesansedoneoklasicizma.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/zong-as-told-to-the-author-by-setaey-adamu-boateng-by-m.-nourbese-philip-z-lib.org_.pdf

“Redact to React: Deconstructing Justice with Erasure Poetry” by Sarah-Jane Coyle in the Liverpool Law Review: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10991-023-09346-6

Other resources:

https://www.moma.org/collection/terms/exquisite-corpse