Award

Frankenstein is one of those stories every young person knows, even before reading Mary Shelley’s famed novel. When students do approach the book, they often read with preconceived images in mind – cue lurid green monsters and frizzy-haired madmen.

Our very own Jenny Nauss, Maya Angelou Young Adult Learning Center Instructional Manager, recently won the first JSTOR Lesson Plan Competition—which is awarded for creative and reproducible lesson plans that incorporate content from the digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources into teaching at the secondary school level. In a lesson plan she created for an Ethics and Literature course at the Maret School, Jenny challenges her students to see beyond the surface of Shelley’s science-fiction tale.

The lesson is as follows: students read and summarize several peer-reviewed academic articles related to Frankenstein, then work on analyzing the author’s text through the lens of these articles. The articles are both intellectually stimulating and difficult—ranging in topic from cloning, to genetic engineering, to genetically modified foods. Frankenstein’s story thus becomes more than just a wacky science experiment; it becomes a lesson on moral decision-making, modern bio-ethics, and philosophical history.

One of the key skills students learn in this lesson plan is the ability to succinctly summarize, in their own words, a challenging text. As Jenny put it, “If the only way you can summarize a text is by using the words of the original, then you don’t truly understand the text.” This is a skill Jenny hopes to foster in students at the YALC, as it is crucial for success in the GED exam, as well as in the professional world. Explicit summarization forces students to think critically about what they are reading and extract the main ideas of the text.

Jenny has been the Instructional Manager at the YALC since June 2015 and came to the Maya Angelou Schools from a 23-year career in teaching. She was most recently an Upper School English teacher at the Maret School, where she developed the Frankenstein Lesson Plan. As her JSTOR award proves, her experience is a wonderful asset to the Maya family, and we look forward to hearing more about her innovative curriculum plans in the months to come!

To learn more about the JSTOR Competition, click here: http://teach.jstor.org/blog/announcing-lesson-plan-award-winners

-Yifan Zhang