Rules, Rebels, and Radicals
There is no better time than now to expose children to different ways of
organizing society. - Herbert Cole
Genre Key:
Informational Text
Contemporary
Realism
Fiction
Folktale
Song/Poem
Digital Text
(underlined and bold
= 1 of 6 annotated)
The Stock Story: Democracy and rules are good. Anarchy and rebels are
dangerous.
● The Purge: Anarchy Official Trailer #1
This text is the trailer for a new movie called The Purge: Anarchy. The theatrical trailer
depicts a movie plot where anarchy is put in place for one night a year so people can get all of
their sins out in one day to keep the society safer throughout the rest of the year. The city is in
chaos when anarchy begins. People grab weapons and don masks to commit all sorts of crimes.
This particular movie is a perfect example of the stock story of anarchy and why we need
particular rules to govern society.
This video would be ideal to begin our inspection of how anarchy is represented in the
media. I would have students watch it once just watching and listening and then have them write
down and share their initial reactions. Then we would watch it again this time writing down
particular aspects of anarchy this story tells of anarchy. What are people doing? What is the
society like? We would share again and then have a discussion about whether we thought that
this is what would happen in a world without rules. What would our classroom look like without
rules? This text would be perfect to begin our exploration of rules, rebels, and radicals as it raises
many questions about how our world is constructed and what another world and organization of
society could be like for better or for worse.
●
Rule is to Break, by John Seven and Jana Christy
A Rule is Break is a picture book that markets anarchy to children as a reason to not eat
your vegetables and eat ice cream for dinner instead. This book’s message is problematic as it
misses the point of why someone might want to be an archarcist. However, it does help raise
important questions about what a society or classroom would look like without masters and
rules. Would children eat only ice cream? Should they and would they listen to their parents?
This text would help us as a class to continue to work through what we think the purpose
of rules are and what they are good for. It would supplement the movie trailer as well as the
ABC’s of Anarchy to help us come to understand a more multifaceted and opinionated
perspective of anarchy and what it means. This text, along with the ABC’s of Anarchy will be
read for literature circles and used to find evidence of how anarchy is defined by people with
different perspectives. Students will compare and contrast these different representations and
explore our essential questions about rules and organization of society.
Concealed Stories:
●
Tales for Little Rebels, Edited by Julia L. Mickenberg and Philip Nel
This text is a collection of radical children’s literature. Herb Kohl had missed this
collection of stories when he wrote about how radical children’s literature does not exist (even
though it is largely nonexistent). Most compelling in this text are the many pictures and old
comics that point critically to the injustices in the ways in which we organize society. Critiques of
capitalism run strongly through the stories in the text as well as tales that call us to question the
fairness of democracy. One of the excerpts from the Socialist Primer asks critical questions how
we imagine society, define property, and who is in charge etc… it would serve as a great way to
begin to ask questions about the stock story depictions of rules, rebels, and radicals.
This text is a great example of how people, whom have different perspectives can come
to define concepts remarkably differently. Students could look at these historical artifacts to
collect evidence to make an argument about what sort of perspective these authors had about
how society is arranged.
● The ABC’s of Anarchy (An anarchist’s definition of anarchy)
●
Talkin’ Bout a Revolution, Tracy Chapman
●
Spirits in the Material World, Police
Resistance (Rebel) Stories:
● 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed U.S. History:
101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed U.S. History is a large
informational text that profiles 101 rebels and radicals in U.S. history in short, digestible writeups. Each rebel or radical that is featured has biographical information, a timeline, a quotation
from them, suggested follow-up activities and extended research possibilities, as well as
questions that ask the reader what they think. The questions this informational text aren’t the
general recall questions you commonly find in textbooks. They are deep, engaging, and push
students to think critically about changemaking and social activism. This book, although its
passages on each changemaker are short, is an incredible resource to get students excited about
and engaged in thinking critically about history. My only hesitation is that the book situates these
rebels as individuals and loses some of the importance of collective action and all the other
radicals who supported these changemakers.
This text will be at the core my unit and make up the bulk of material we cover in the
stories of resistance. It serves the common core standards of argumentative writing in which
students use textual evidence to make an argument about a text. This text also supports further
student research online and facilitates multimodal learning across media.
●
Rebel Without a Pause, Public Enemy
●
Fight the Power, Public Enemy
Transformative/Emerging Stories:
●
Imagine, John Lennon
John Lennon’s popular song Imagine, is a perfect segway into the realm of the creation
of emerging and transforming stories of rules, rebels, and radicals. He asks us to imagine a
world without many of the structures that we currently use to define it. “Imagine there’s no
countries..Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.” My hopes would be that student’s
realize that being a dreamer is an important and powerful tool.
This song would be great for speaking and listening standards as well as oral language
skills as we could sing it as a class while thinking about how we might “imagine all the people.”
We would sing it several times and discuss what John Lennon might want us to Imagine. I
would give it some historical context and also have student choose how we would want to sing
the song (all together, building line by line, etc.. to build fluency and confidence).
●
Levels of Behavior Chart:
This chart makes it into this unit in the transforming and emerging stories section, as it
will serve as a tool with which we analyze the rules in our own classroom. The color chart is one
that is commonly used in classrooms as the foundation of the classroom management system,
(Jennings Elementary for sure). Students are meant to aim to always “be on green” for rewards
and there are consequences for “being on red.”
In this unit we would pick apart this chart and what it means for shaping a classroom
community. What does it mean when someone is on red? Should students be allowed to act
angrily or express frustration? Are there any rules that should be changed, removed, written
better, or added? How does this chart define people as “good” and “bad.” What assumptions do
these definitions make? This chart will serve as a springboard into our critical action to
reimagine how we organize our classroom to be more equitable.