Here’s another approach shared by Wendy Boisonnault and Arlene Lee from Sir Winston Churchill in Calgary.
If you haven’t encountered Andree Chedid’s From Sleep Unbound, you might want to consider it for your syllabus. Here’s a brief summary from Ohio University Press:
From Sleep Unbound portrays the life of Samya, an Egyptian woman who is taken at age 15 from her Catholic boarding school and forced into a loveless and humiliating marriage. Eventually sundered from every human attachment, Samya lapses into despair and despondence, and finally an emotionally caused paralysis. But when she shakes off the torpor of sleep, the sleep of avoidance, she awakens to action with the explosive energy of one who has been reborn.
And a review comment from the Times:
Much of this delicately composed, elegant novel is a gentle and simple story of a woman searching for herself in a world of callous, unimaginative male supremacy…. The writing, disclosing bitter, painful truths, is deceptively lyrical.
The approach to the Interactive Oral that Arlene and Wendy used with this novel was through the production of brochures, which they also found to be very successful: “With the Brochure/Jigsaw discussion, they liked having each other’s brochures to refer to when writing their Reflective Statements. They also each had a chance to discuss and answer questions about their topics in the jigsaw that went beyond the condensed information on the brochure.”
Here is a sample of the work students did: