Connecting to the Universe and Ourselves
How the Grand Challenges Connect to ELA classrooms
If you have read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, you know it is a novel rich in historical references and scientific discovery. Stoker’s characters ride trains, talk about feminist movements, and take opioids to help themselves fall asleep. The best interaction Stoker’s characters have with their contemporary world, though, is the blood transfusions. Van Helsing presides over so many blood transfusions, and they are done so incredibly wrong! Not one time is anyone’s blood tested to make sure they are compatible. Lucy should have died from bad medical procedures, not Dracula scaring her with a wolf!
Despite knowing better now, blood transfusions were fairly new when Dracula was written, and Stoker shows that he did research into the procedure by describing it in such detail. Understanding the world contributes to understanding literature and being able to write it well.
This idea is also shown through the Grand Challenges, an Education Resources Consortium project based on Smithsonian Institute data that pushes curriculum that fosters more curiosity and exploration for students. The four grand challenges are “unlocking the mysteries of the universe, understanding and sustaining a biodiverse planet, valuing world cultures, and understanding the American experience,” and each challenge connects with English Language Arts classrooms.
The first two challenges, “unlocking the mysteries of the universe” and “understanding and sustaining a biodiverse planet,” connect to ELA classrooms in similar ways. Both these challenges focus on understanding the way the universe and world act and why. The first challenge focuses on the universe and why people throughout history have held certain assertions about it, and the second focuses on Earth’s environments and how people interact(ed) with it. Knowing the science of our universe and how people interacted with it and continue to do so helps students interact with texts and their own writing. In terms of literature, similar to how Dracula breaks the illusion of real danger during very unreal blood transfusions, inaccuracies in science break the illusion. Realizing this within literature helps students pinpoint certain sections of a book that they may have disliked instead of leading them to dislike the entire book. It also leads to inquiries about the book and the author. Was the inaccuracy made based on the assumptions held at the time or a misunderstanding that the author held? Or, was the inaccuracy made on purpose as some type of statement? For example, Gulliver’s Travels by Johnathon Swift, despite being a fantasy novel, has scientific ideas twisted in the last two islands Gulliver visits in order to make Swift’s satirical statements. Understanding why an author created the inaccuracy can help students’ writing by being the basis for which they write an analytical essay. Understanding the first two challenges can also help students’ creative writing. Knowing why the universe and world work the way they do and why and how people have interacted with it throughout time can help them create a text that is believable and may deal with relevant issues for the time it takes place. On the other hand, it may help them create their own piece of satire.
The third and fourth challenges also connect with one another in similar ways. These ones are “understanding the American experience” and “valuing world cultures.” The third challenge focuses primarily on the United States and its history. That history deals both with political and social events, but also the history of people in the United States and how people interact with one another. How different cultures have contributed to the artistic and personal development in America also plays a large role. The fourth challenge focuses on similar ideas, but around the world and not just in the United States. How different cultures interact with one another, and how those interactions shaped how those cultures grew is a large part of “valuing world cultures.” There is also a question for how cultures interacting has caused certain cultures to lose their identities. Similar to how the first two challenges focus on science to help students understand texts, these challenges do the same with culture. The same ideas from the first challenges can be applied to these as well, but there’s also a question of why does the author make their text take place where it does, with the people that it does, with the conflicts surrounding them? The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas is a good example of a book that purposefully uses an African American teenager living in a low income area but going to a private school to show how character and context is vital to the story. Readers also have to know, though, the current state of African American relations in the United States and generally all European settled areas, as well as the history of race relations, to understand why the book is realistic instead of dystopian. That idea applies to all texts because understanding the context of books makes people more empathetic. For books written by authors outside the United States, understanding that culture allows students to become empathetic to what the author is writing. Reading books written outside the United States is also important for students to understand world affairs. Reading both books written in the United States and outside allows students to also see how their culture is directly impacted by another or vise versa and then make life decisions based on what they see. They can also use the information they receive from these challenges similar to the first two. It can help students write more thought provoking and intentional essays or creative pieces.
Another major reason students applying all four Grand Challenges to their ELA classroom is important is because it forces students to continuously ask what if…? These types of questions lead to more important discussions about character motivation, setting purpose, etc., and lead to the innovation that is seen in the English field. For example, a student could ask what if no one had ever sailed to the Americas, causing the American romantic period to never happen, but Nathaniel Hawthorne still wrote The Scarlet Letter? How would the book be different? Without the emphasis and focus on nature that was such a large part of the American identity during the Romantic period, would the parallels to nature still have existed? Would the witch trials still be an integral part of Hawthorne’s introduction? The way people interacted with and understood nature and how people interacted with each other would have widely varied. Luckily, the Grand Challenges promote this type of inquiry.
