Powerpoint presented to Content Investigations class. Contains an overview of my Holes and Goals project and the products that make up that assignment.

1. Survey of World Literature A Glimpse of Cultures Around the World By Cat Holland

2. Initial Goals By the end of the course, I will be able to… develop a familiarity with texts with significant literary merit from around the world analyze and think critically about significant world literature describe ways in which texts from around the world reflect the culture and time in which they were written make literary connections with texts in the western canon.

3. Essential Questions How do world perspectives differ from Western ones? Which universal themes are present in literature across time and cultures? In what ways is literature universal? In what ways is it specific to a specific time, geographic location, or culture?

4. Products Comparative essay A guide to graphic novels “Around the World in 8 Pages” Factbook Catnotes – Study Guide to Persepolis

5. Resources Amazon.com/my kindle Curriculum POP ning The English Journal Various novels from around the world

6. Enduring Understandings Literature across time and geographic location always contains some kind of tension (either internal, between characters, between individual desire and civic duty, etc.). Literature often has two goals: to entertain as well as inform. Conflict, identity and love are themes found in almost every text.

7. Favorite Resource The Complete Persepolis by MarjaneSatrapi This book is such a fast-paced read! I learned so much about the Iran-Iraq War and the events leading up to it. Despite the heavy subject matter, this book doesn’t drag. There’s plenty of humor to liven things up. Marjane is an outspoken and rebellious heroine.

8. Reflections I found it helpful to both design the assignments and be required to do them. This is definitely an example of student-centered learning. I would consider allowing students to take part in the design process of some of their product assessments, as I am convinced that it helps produce more thorough and interesting work.

9. What Now? I “discovered” graphic novels. I would absolutely use them in the classroom. I would like to read more of them in the future and decide which ones are developmentally appropriate for my students (and perhaps, which ones can be made available for the department). After filling this hole, I realized that my knowledge of American literature is perhaps not what it should be. I will have to read up on that in the future!

10. Ongoing Development I will be using the Making Curriculum POP ning in the future – it’s a social network for teachers. I discovered wordswithoutborders.org; this is a good source for contemporary short stories and poems from around the world and it also reviews newly published texts, as well.