Think of an instance where a student's cultural background and belief structure informed how they interacted with your classroom or a piece of literature you were teaching.
Oh, there are so many fun examples of this. Where to begin? I found that when I was teaching Frankenstein, students pulled religion and personal ethics into the text quite a bit. Students would say things like, "But, that's just the way God made him, God has a plan for everyone, etc." Students also felt strongly on either end of the "is it right for Victor to kill him" spectrum. Some students said yes, that he wasn't human and wanted to know if they could use the death penalty as a form of sentencing in their mock trial of The Creature v. V. Frankenstein (I said, "no"). Others said that it wasn't right to take somebody's life just because they didn't come out they way you had planned. These students often used God as an example. I found this really interesting because the Creature uses the analogy of being "an abortion," but none of my students ever delved into that topic. I did not press it on them, because I did not find it to be a beneficial discussion for our educational objectives in the unit.
After watching clips of the Brannagh Frankenstein, I had my classes vote on which actors they would cast to play the various characters in Frankenstein. When one student suggested Denzel Washington as the Monster, the students broke out in an uproar saying that Frankenstein couldn't be Black, and asking me if they could cast Black people in the roles. I said of course and asked them how casting a Black man as Frankenstein's monster with a white Victor would change the meaning of the story. What if it was a Black cast with the exception of the Monster? The students got really interested in how the actor changed the meaning of the text.
When I showed the film, Jurassic Park, my students commented on how the only two black actors on screen (one for only a few moments at the beginning) were doomed to die. They commented on the Hollywood trend of killing off black characters. Instead of dismissing this observation, I opened the topic up for discussion. I think this surprised a number of my students, because they didn't have much to say afterwards. I pushed by asking of examples of satire they had observed in other films and they talked about scenes from Scary Movie and Scream 4. The students seemed, not surprisingly, engaged that the classroom forum could be open to matters of import they experienced in their own lives.
Your students are brilliant. Usually, I'm really opposed to the idea of playing with a text in ways that alter the meaning, but I love the idea of creating a piece based on Frankenstein with a racially reworked class. It seems like there's lots of room to create a text that looks at Frankenstein as a text about race and talks back to it a la Wide Sargasso Sea. I wonder if a process like this would also change the way that students viewed the Creature v. Frankenstein trial. Would changing the races of the characters change the places where they place blame?
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