[minti_dropcap style=”normal”]A[/minti_dropcap]s part of the “follow up” portion of an FFT fellowship, grant recipients complete a Passport that documents their learning and where they plan to go from here. Teachers answer brief questions in three categories:
During the month of August, we’ll share some of our Fellows’ Passports to get us all in the “Back to School” mode. Today, we’re proud to share the reflections of Jacqueline Catcher, teacher at Exeter High School in Exeter, NH.
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Fellowship Description
Tour literary sites associated with famous British authors, including William Shakespeare, the Bronte sisters, and Horace Walpole; examine the impact of Gothic architecture in the development of characterization and theme in Jane Eyre; and study canonical literature at the Oxbridge Teacher Seminar at the University of Cambridge to create differentiated and engaging learning for academic and AP English students.
Personal & Professional Growth
I am returning well equipped to integrate British literature, artwork, architecture, and history into all of my courses. I learned about unique ways to approach poetry analysis, which have students engaging in visual, auditory, and kinesthetic analysis. I can also see how various local museums, parks, and libraries offer unique opportunities for literary analysis based on these new techniques. This has been the most inspiring, exhilarating, and rewarding professional development I’ve ever had.
Oftentimes we teach art, history, and literature we’ve never actually seen. Now I am able to incorporate primary documents, pamphlets, photographs, books, and videos that I prepared throughout my trip and tailored to my lessons. I have photos of paintings and videos of interactive art installations that will help my students explore literary themes in unique mediums. I’m most excited to share the 3D and panoramic photos I took, so students can observe England as if they were actually there.
I challenged myself to create more adds-on units for traditional texts. I’m required to teach Shakespeare to my struggling readers, so I knew I wanted to build a Globe Theatre facade and host a night that would not only provide my students with an authentic audience, but it would also showcase their work. By collecting materials, visiting historic sites, and experiencing a performance in the actual Globe Theatre, I learned how to approach this project and production.
Impact on Your Classroom, School & Community
Students will read and discuss literature through visual, auditory, and kinesthetic methods that will engage them beyond the page. They will derive meaning from modern art, connect current historical and art exhibits to past literature, and think critically about how spaces and architecture frame both characters’ worlds as well as their own. They will visit England through photos and videos while at the same time physically constructing these spaces to share with their community.
I am collaborating with our school’s theater director to host a Shakespeare night. Our classes will work together to construct the facade of the Globe Theatre onstage and prepare a performance of various scenes, monologues, dances, and musical productions to honor Shakespeare’s work. In addition, I will also be collaborating with an educator from Pakistan who I met during my coursework. We are planning to lead short story discussion groups between our students via video chats.
Imagining the Future
I believe the best way to celebrate student learning is by providing authentic audiences, which push students to educate others beyond their peers. Our community Shakespeare night will allow students to prepare and present their research, analysis, and performances for our local community. Additionally, my AP Literature students will construct small dioramas that look at natural and architectural spaces’ impact on characterization in Jane Eyre. These will be on display in our school library.
Too often we dismiss older literature as antiquated or out-of-touch. What we fail to recognize is that the reason these plays, novels, or poems are deemed classics is because they explore universal themes that help us contemplate the world around us. Literature can’t be read or even analyzed in a vacuum though. It is deeply social, overlapping with other subjects and cultures. I hope students can help others see that literacy and literature is valuable to understanding everything.
Observing the world as both a traveler and a teacher provides a unique vantage point. You absorb, discuss, photograph, and document everything with more intensity, knowing that you aren’t just seeing these places for yourself, you are experiencing them for the hundreds of students who will pass through your classroom. I can only hope my fellowship will change my students’ outlook on poetry, literature, art, and architecture as much as this journey has changed my life as an educator.
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Jacqueline teaches Freshman English and AP Literature, as well as pre-service teachers at the University of New Hampshire. She empowers students through independent reading and authentic writing experiences using a workshop model. Outside of the classroom, she enjoys serving as the vice president of the New Hampshire Council for Teachers of English and advisor of her school’s Government Club and Writer’s Club. See more of her fellowship and follow her on Twitter:[minti_social icon=”fa-twitter” url=”https://twitter.com/@JackieCatcher” target=”_self”]
Charlotte Brontë, who sent her Jane Eyre manuscript to a London publisher on this date in 1847, wrote, “Your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.” This summer, Amanda Kingston (Odyssey Leadership Academy – Oklahoma City) used her time (and a Fund for Teachers grant) to research the Brontë sisters, especially Charlotte – regarded as “the first historian of the private consciousness.”
On my Fund for Teachers fellowship, I navigated through five European countries in the hopes of learning more about Carol Gilligan’s work on the ethic of care in connection to the lives and histories of women. Among the women I journeyed to “meet” were Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, authors and sisters.
Haworth, England, is a small town that has capitalized on the mythology of the Brontë family. It’s hard to know if the Brontës modeled their stories after the environment of Haworth, or if Haworth has wrapped itself up in the Brontës. Whether it’s chicken or egg, at the heart, they’re inseparable. And, if you can’t get enough of the gothic atmosphere, you can hike out to the Brontë Waterfall across the moors and even farther to Top Withens, a possible location for the Wuthering Heights of Emily’s imagination. In the mist and among the heather you can almost hear Cathy still calling for Heathcliff.
The Brontë Parsonage Museum itself is in the midst of celebrating the 200th anniversaries of the Brontë children: for 2017, this is Branwell. The small parsonage is preserved beautifully, with portraits of the family hung in each room; the table where the women bent over needlework, writing, and dinners; and the study of the family patriarch, Patrick Brontë, complete with his spectacles and magnifying glass. The staff were enthusiastic and kind, offering up knowledge about the family not with an air of pretension, but rather as though talking warmly about old friends. The Brontës are very much real people to this crowd. Prior to this fellowship, I did not know much about the Brontës. I did a quick reread of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre earlier this year, and watched the BBC television special To Walk Invisible. The production worked closely with the Brontë Society and the museum also includes stills and costumes from the series.
For more on Jane Eyre’s iconic line “Reader, I married him,” click here.
In researching before the trip, I learned that in the original publications, the sisters chose not to use their given names. Instead, they used pseudonyms: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Charlotte explained after the deaths of Emily and Anne in 1848 and 1849 respectively, they wanted their work taken seriously, not frowned upon as womenly nonsense nor praised patronizingly as female folly. The Brontës were real writers with real things to say about the real world around them. And really, in 1847 when Jane Eyre was published, only male authors were taken seriously. The museum even includes a letter from a poet Charlotte admired advising her that writing was not for women.
I realized, a few days before in Chawton, that there is a reason we don’t say that Jane Austen’s books are about the human experience, though they certainly include suffering, trials, family, love, and loss. (The Jane Austen Society, coincidentally, is celebrating her life with the bicentennial of her death this year, as well.) The Brontës recognized this also, and when Charlotte sent Jane Eyre to be published she wanted the story of a young governess, a deeply misguided Mr. Rochester, and a “madwoman” in the attic to be a story received with the utmost sincerity and gravity, a story of human experience- not just male or female. And it was: Jane Eyre became the talk of London and new editions came out almost immediately. It’s a story of human experience and human emotions that belong to all of us, and I believe people recognized this, despite knowing the true identity of the author.
I’ll be honest, I was not a Brontë fan before visiting the parsonage. I enjoyed their books, yes, and they were interesting figures to me. But I wasn’t a “fan.” However, there is something about walking in the home of a person, seeing their correspondence and their village, walking across the moors of their lives for even just a day that spins stories to a different light. It makes you not just a fan, but a friend. I learned more about their heart and the courage they had to put their stories out to the world, and to put themselves in their stories.
I don’t think that it’s any accident that the original title of Charlotte’s first novel was Jane Eyre: An Autobiography.
Amanda serves as both a mentor and humanities teacher at Odyssey Leadership Academy in Oklahoma City and previously worked as a teacher in Louisiana’s public education sector. She is passionate about creating courses that focus on justice and empowering students to enrich and transform the community around them.