The Things They Carried - Empathy Building Unit
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Description
The series of activities in this unit are designed to enhance empathy for your students to situations, people, cultures, and places they may have never experienced before.
Tim O’Brien’s book, The Things They Carried, is an excellent literary resource, in particular with setting, narrator, and characterization, imagery, syntax, and more, as well as developing deeper understandings of the themes of war, post-traumatic stress disorder, battlefield violence, social and political inequities, and mental health.
This unit lasts between ten to eleven class sessions and encourages students to have deep, analytical discussions about the text as well as political-social activism both then and now. This unit includes:
- Teacher Instructions
- Pacing Guide
- 34 Slides PDF or PowerPoint/Keynote Presentation Introducing the war in Vietnam, literary terms, and The Things They Carried
- Seven research and writing activities about building empathy by assigning students to dawn the persona of original fictional characters "alive" during the era of the Vietnam war
- A poetry analysis and thesis development activity
- Song Analysis about music from the era of the Vietnam war
- And a Spotify playlist to have as background music during your discussions
This unit is designed for AP Literature and Composition or American Literature classes.
