One of my favourite works of literature is William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Published in 1789 (Songs of Innocence) and 1794 (Songs of Experience), in the middle of a buzzing period to say the least (the French Revolution, the conflict with the American ex-colonies, the Englightenment, and more importantly for this particular project, the industrial revolution), these poems encapsulate the duplicity of progress, society, human relationships and many other issues which, over 200 years later, are still relevant.
As usual, I made a presentation to show my students:
Although all of them knew about the industrial revolution, as they had recently covered it in History (this is the beauty of inter-disciplinary topics!), none of them had heard of Blake and only a few of them had considered the artistic output inspired by it.
Connecting the 18th Century social issues with the 21st Century was a bit of a revelation for part of the class and triggered a fruitful, improvised class discussion on the effects our lifestyles are having on developing countries. My aim was to focus the issues on childhood, and the impact that adult decisions and actions have on children.
Although writing creatively isn't always received positively by students (most of them wanted to make a short film about this), because of time constraints, it is often the most sensible option. The visual part of this project, in the end, had to be abandoned because of the same reason; if I do this project again, I will certainly try to involve both the History and the Art teachers to fulfil its potential.
You can read the students' stories clicking on the Stories at Base blog.
Thanks for reading this post!
Maite
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