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 * September 13 - October 20, 2010**

This wiki is a sharing space for Lillian Osborne students co-constructing a resource to support their studies of Heinrich Boll's novel, //The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum//. Click on the links to the left to view and add information, when need be, to the pages.

[|View our course introduction/Letter to parents and students]

(Scroll down the page for some reading support.)


 * Getting Started**

Our study of Heinrich Boll's novel //The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum// will serve five purposes:

1. to broaden our sense of post-World-War-II Europe, from a literary perspective, and in particular, to scrutinize the types of interactions that take place in the novel to see how and why such interactions are possibly as common today as they were in the 1970s. //Assignment//: Participate in discussions, to show what you have learned (see the wiki for details). (Week 1 macro level background building)

2. to challenge each of us to take charge of our own reading and interpretations of text, and to offer interpretations into a collaborative workspace so that we can together assimilate new, enriched understandings of themes, motifs, character, etc. //Assignment//: read and annotate; post themes/topics below, and then add them to collaborative Google Docs and analyze them (see wiki for details). (Weeks 2-5 developmental inquiry activities, co-constructing knowledge)

3. to broaden our sense of the function of narrative and the craft of story-telling – to gain an appreciation of and a vocabulary with which to discuss the structure and style of this modern novel. //Assignment//: in your group, create a visual representation of one aspect of structure or style in this novel (see wiki for details). (Week 3 micro level style analysis)

4. to collaborate in building new views of the novel that reflect a synthesis of learning; to showcase these learnings through a variety of presentation media formats. The resulting presentations will form the eventual content of this wiki, which will be used as a reference later on when we begin to grow independent inquiries in World Literature Paper 1 assignments. //Assignment//: With group members, design and carry out an inquiry based on a topic of interest in this novel. Your product will be a presentation. Be creative (see wiki for details). (Weeks 4-5 - building new knowledge)

5. to set in place and familiarize ourselves with a framework of inquiry, which will provide step-by-step support through the learning process as we hone our own reflective, metacognitive skills. //Assignment//: Review //Focus of Inquiry// appendix materials, and use them to guide/review inquiry process (see wiki for details). (Runs throughout the unit.)

By the end of this novel study, students will have moved along the inquiry path, within a structured environment. As we expand our study into a study of the other World Literature novels, you'll be able to use your evolving familiarity with the inquiry process and your practical compilation of ideas collected so far to inform areas for each subsequent focus. Each of our three novel studies thus grows out of the one before, challenging participants to practise the reading and knowledge-building in increasingly more independent ways.