Night and how to get students to make a meaningful connection

I taught Night by Elie Wiesel last school year and I may teach it again this coming school year. I found Night to be an excellent novel to get students to begin to develop an internal dialogue about social justice and each person’s responsibility. One webquest search I found to be incredibly useful in giving the students an idea of how to connect to the images of the horrific events of the holocaust is http://cte.jhu.edu/techacademy/web/2000/baczkowski/intro.htm. There the students created powerful poetry designed to ensure that their friends do not forget the horrors of the holocaust. Each student’s poem has hyperlinked visual images which fills the senses of the reader. The students ultimate goal was to explain why the book by Elie Wiesel is tilted Night.
Although my students struggled somewhat with Night (that is, they failed to make immediate connections), once we began to make real life connections and once we began to talk about social justice they began to understand the seriousness of the situation. I like the lesson in the webquest mentioned above since it has students create their own interpretive visual creative response.

Fences Webquest

Fences WebQuest

The unit I enjoyed teaching the most this year centered on August Wilson’s Fences. It was relatable and engaging for all of my students including the reluctant readers. In hindsight I feel that if I would have been able to incorporate a webquest, specifically the one referenced above, my students would have had a deeper understanding of some of the subtleties in the text. This webquest centers on understanding the setting of the play in order to facilitate a broad and in depth understanding of the play. I feel this webquest is important because in order for students to understand what is going on in this story they need to understand the full implications of what was taking place during this time in history. This webquest asks students to create a webpage which must include various media such as poetry, sound clips and video. With so many options this quest is great for multimodal learning as well as providing an opportunity for non-traditional, authentic learning.