a. This is a pre-reading activity
b. Title: Mapping the Action
c. Rationale: Students often have trouble visualizing the setting and movement of a story, especially if the story takes place in another country. Though this activity is designed for the novel The Namesake it could easily be adapted for use for any text that takes place in a location students may be unfamiliar with. This activity also helps activate prior knowledge and would serve as a good warm-up activity in a discussion of international cultural differences.
d. Procedure
Time: 10 Minutes
Resources needed: Worksheet with world map and instructions (below), Internet Access,
The Namesake is about the Ganguli family's life in America and their son Gogol's search for his identity. The parents, Ashoke and Ashima, were both born in Calcutta, India and the children, Gogol and Sonia, were both born in the Boston metropolitan area in the state of Massachusetts.
The story's conflict takes on not only geographic but also cultural proportions. As Ashoke and Ashima acclimate themselves to American life, their native-born American children grow up within the embrace of their Bengali parents, and Gogol and Sonia learn in many ways how their bicultural identity sets them apart from other children.
To understand how long the "journey" was that Ashoke and Ashima took from India to the United States, examine the map with a partner. Find India. Draw a line from India to where you believe Boston, Massachusetts is located. Then search the Internet to find out exactly where Calcutta is and what the exact mileage is from Calcutta to Boston.
From: The Book-of-the-Semester Project at Hostos Community College (2006-2007). Retrieved from http://www.hostos.cuny.edu/oaa/book/book2/guidejl1.htm
Rational for selection: I think this is a wonderful activity that works to further engage students with the selected text. I would add that journey pieces that have more than one stop- such as Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" would be an excellent text for this idea. Another piece that makes this a valuable activity is, I think, that showing the actual location of something from a novel makes it real. Showing pictures of the apartment building Anne Frank lived in, or the real Angel fountain in NY from Angels in America, may be enough to really engage some students.
ReplyDeleteDostoevsky, Fyodor. (2006). Crime and Punishment. New York, NY: Signet Classics.
Kushner, Tony. (1995). Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Part One: Millennium Approaches Part Two: Peristroika. New York, NY: Theatre Communications Group.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. (2003). The Namesake. New York, NY: First Mariner Books.