Teacher's guide for What's the Issue? A WebQuest full of Great Expectations

by Jacqueline Cowley-Donaldson

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Introduction

Use this WebQuest to help 9 English Literature students learn about Charles Dickens and Social Issues. The goal is to get students engaging in critical thinking. Students should also be aware of social issues present in society as well as recognizing how these issues have changed over the years.

Overview

Main Topic:	Charles Dickens and Social Issues
Subtopics:	Child labor laws, penal institutions, social classes, abusive relationships
Grade Level:	9
Subject(s):	English Literature
Learning Goal:	engaging in critical thinking

Vision and Reality

If the learning goal were achieved in the most ideal of perfect worlds it would look something like:

Students need to be able to relate issues in literature to events and issues that exist in today's society. This allows them to make a connection with the literature and better understand the characters, their motivations, and the outcomes of their actions.
Students who are studying Charles Dicken's Great Expectations should be aware of some of the social issues present in the story and see the connections to social issues that surround them today. This is a quest that will help students to make these connections and show their understanding of them.

However, what I anticipate probably looks more like:

Based on the Vision set for this activity, the actual reality is more likely to be that students will understand better some of the issues present in society today, though they may not make the connections as to why these issues are relevant to them individually. Students may or may not be able to compare the issues in Dicken's Great Expectations and the Victorian period, though they may be able to pick out issues from that time that are similar to issues present today.

The What - If Inventory

To give the activity its best chance at helping students learn, I assembled this list of possible resources:

access to computers, word processing,

web sites, e-mail connections, posting a page

interaction between classes, responding to sites that post queries

Presentation day

Standards

Conclusion

created by Jacqueline Cowley-Donaldson email: donaldson2@yahoo.com, jcowley@srsd.org http://www.web-and-flow.com/members/jcowleyd/dickens/webquest.htm