Recasting the Text: Inquiry-Based Activities for Comprehending and Composing

by Mary Frances Claggett, Louann Reid, Ruth Vinz

Recasting the Text , a companion volume to Learning the Landscape , provides activities that help students explore multiple ways of reading and re-creating a text in various forms. Examining the concept and uses of intertextuality among works from diverse times, places, and peoples, students see how individuals re-read and re-see human experience through stories. By creating texts themselves and reading clusters of texts from similar sources, students...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0867094028
• ISBN13: 9780867094022
• Release Date: November 1996
• Publisher: Heinemann Educational Books
• Length: 254 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.2"
• Age Range: 12 to 17 years
• Grade Range: Grades 9 to 12

Customer Reviews

Helpful Activities to Model, But Also A Useful Theory for Teaching

The main premise of the book is that students can use "seven angles of vision" in responding to a text and thus can "recast" the text, as readers, writers, and partners in a classroom dedicated to literature. The seven angles include "initial responses, story threads, shifting perspectives, connecting with the writer, language and craft, recasting the text," and finally, "You, the Text, the World." Students apply a variety of different techniques, including double-entry logs, creative responses, and collaborative activities in each of these angles. As a classroom teacher, I found the book very useful. Some of the activities and exercises within can be lifted wholesale as practice tryouts if teachers would like to test the theories in their own classrooms, but also, the book can serve as a model for developing a year-long curriculum that encourages teachers and students to think about texts in innovative and creative ways. While the book's examples include mainly essays, short fiction and poetry, there is also a section on performance, and the examples should be easily adaptable to longer works of fiction or nonfiction. The bulk of the book is made up of examples and activities, not theoretical passages, and can be put into ease pretty readily in any lit teacher's practice.