Connecting with “The Story of the Giants”

This Photo of the Hotel Ukraine (Ukraina) in Moscow (2006) was posted by Flickr User “Argenberg,” and may be found at http://flickr.com/photos/argenberg/264993696/

My audioclip from last night’s homework quoted an interview in which Shaun Tan spoke with Zack Smith, entitled “After The Arrival: Talking to Shaun Tan” (the transcript is available online at http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=134270):

[Question from Z. Smith]: While the book does do a great job of depicting the challenges of day-to-day life for someone in a new country, many of The Arrival’s most powerful sequences are the ones where the immigrant talks to fellow immigrants and sees their stories in flashback. What are some of the challenges that come with translating a historical experience into a fantastical image?

[Answer from S. Tan]: I think being careful not to get too carried away with the imaginary aspects, and making sure that every detail has some connection with familiar history, that it still feels real even though it might look very unreal.

The one I call “The Story of the Giants” is a good example, where a European-looking city (based on Florence) is being destroyed by huge figures, vacuuming everything into burning furnaces – people, buildings, birds. This was actually inspired by two things – Nazi book-burnings and industrialized genocide, and one immigrant’s description of Communism in Romania where all the life and culture seemed to have been “sucked out” of architecture, music, people’s lives and even the birdsong taken from the trees.

The reconstructed landscape ruled over by the one-eyed giants is inspired by Soviet-style architecture: concrete prisms that grow like crystals, not quite straight, culturally vacuous. Ultimately, my intention is to reflect historical events emotionally through surrealist imagery, and avoid reference to any specific time or place. Ideally, a person who knows something of persecution on any level, in any country, will be able to relate to imaginary scenes in stories such as this.

In pairs, for about 20 minutes we explored some links that have to do with references Shaun Tan makes in his answer to Zack Smith’s question (you were invited to explore them in no particular order):

• Florence, Italy Photographic Tour (Virtual Tourist.com)
• “Book Burning” from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Website
• “Imagine Art Gallery – Student Expressions,” from Remember.org (A Cybrary of the Holocaust)
• Wikipedia Article: Communist Romania
• Wikipedia Article: Soviet Style Architecture (aka Stalinist Architecture)
• Definitions of “persecutions” on the web
• Definitions of “vacuous” on the web

After working on building more connections, we discussed last night’s homework assignment, including the process of using Meebo to dialogue about Tan’s “The Story of the Giants” illustration and new insights gained by doing a bit of in-class research today.

Homework:

1. Tonight, you will read Section IV and Section V of The Arrival.
2. In the comments section below, come up with your final ideas on the name of the man’s creature friend. Give a brief explanation on why you have chosen that name. We will choose the 5 favorites tomorrow, and vote on a final “class-agreed name” as part of your homework tomorrow night.

–Silver Lisa

Connecting with Immigration in the Present

This image is a screen shot of

FOR REAL: A Web Documentary about Immigrant Lives in NYC

The Ellis Island virtual tour and Bertha Devlin’s interview certainly helped us further our learning not only about the topic of immigration, but also about reading visual images.

The topic of immigration is one that we hear about a lot on the news, especially since the presidential election is less than a year away and this is one hot issue for a lot of voters.

For your homework tonight, you will be reading Section III of The Arrival. To help build more connections to help you read The Arrival with deeper understanding, we explored immigration in the present time through the eyes of 3 teenagers whose familes have made their homes in New York.

The website we explored for this class activity was FOR REAL: A Web Documentary about Immigrant Lives in NYC (accessed at http://www.tenement.org/foreal/). In pairs, we spent the class period exploring this website.

Homework:

For your homework, you will be working with the same partner you worked with today in class. Before class ended, I let you know that you would need to set a up a time this evening that you both could be online for an IM chat session.

1. Prior to this pre-scheduled time, you will read Section III of The Arrival at least one time, using your visual literacy skills, including a reflection on the connections we’ve been making regarding the topic of immigration.
2. Also, before the pre-scheduled meeting time, listen to the audioclip (look below the illustration) that I created to highlight the above illustration from Section III. (Shaun Tan has informally deemed this illustration, “The Story of the Giants.”) This will help you to make a deeper connection in your reading of the story, as well as in the IM chat session you’ll conduct next.
3. As requested in the audioclip, write 3 questions about “The Story of the Giants” you would ask Shaun Tan in an interview if you could. You can do this after your IM session if you like.
4. Using the Meebo IM account we used in our last unit of study, you and your partner will spend 10 minutes reading and discussing the illustration shown above from Section III. (Shaun Tan has informally deemed this illustration, “The Story of the Giants.”)
5. Each of you should then (a) copy and paste the text of your IM chat session into an email addressed to me and (b) include at least 2 additional sentences about something you personally found interesting either about the homework session or today’s class session.

–Silver Lisa

◊◊◊◊Note: The illustration above from The Arrival is directly linked to Shaun Tan’s website. You may access it at the following links: http://shauntan.net/books.html and http://shauntan.net/images/books/the-arrival8.jpg.◊◊◊◊

Connecting with Immigration in the Past

Click on the link for a Google Map of Ellis Island and the Surrounding Area: Ellis Island map – Tagzania

Today we began class with a continuation of our discussion of the immigration connection–that is, how we can connect our growing knowledge about immigration to our visual reading of the wordless book, The Arrival.

In the podcast interview you listened to for your homework, Shaun Tan and Grant Stone spoke a bit about the immigration connection. While Tan is from Australia, and his most familiar experiences dealt with immigration in his own country, he explained that he did a lot of research on immigration while writing The Arrival. This included exploring the stories of immigrants that entered America through Ellis Island.

As you hopefully recall, Ellis Island located at the mouth of the Hudson River in New York Harbor. From January 1, 1892 through November 12, 1954, this facility was the main entry point for immigrants entering America.

In 1892, Ellis Island was one of 30 federal processing stations for incoming immigrants.

Wealthy immigrants who could afford to travel in first class or second class were given automatic entry into the U.S., however, anyone who did not travel in first or second class was required to pass a 6-second physical examination.

The theory behind this was that if a person could afford to purchase a first or second class ticket, they were less likely to become a public charge in America due to medical or legal reasons.

If you were unlucky enough to be be exhibiting visible health problems or diseases, you would be sent back to your home country or held in the island’s hospital facilities for long periods of time. Approximately 2% of immigrants traveling to Ellis Island were not admitted after the long transatlantic voyage–because of this, it was also known as “The Island of Tears” or “Heartbreak Island.” Still, between 1892 and 1954, more than 12 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island. (Noteworty is the fact that the very first immigrant to pass through Ellis Island was a 15-year-old girl from County Cork, Ireland named Annie Moore.)

Following a brief introduction to Ellis Island, in pairs we took a virtual fieldtrip to the immigrant processing station through Scholastic.com’s “Interactive Tour of Ellis Island” available at http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/immigration/tour/index.htm. We took notes during the tour using a form I located at http://www.thirteen.org/edonline/ntti/resources/lessons/h_goldendoor/goldendoor2.pdf.

Homework Assignment

For this assignment, I gave each of you a piece of 11 by 14 paper, and had you fold it in thirds. Then, we labeled the paper in the manner illustrated above. I told you that the paper would be used in the homework, but didn’t explain who or what “Bertha Devlin” is. To complete the assignment, you will listen to an audioclip I created using Audacity (and uploaded to blip.tv), as well as 7 corresponding audioclips that you can access by clicking on this link and looking for the audioclip links with the titles I’ve provided below under the heading “7 Audoclips for Homework Use”.

7 Audio Clips for Homework Use:

1. Bertha Devlin 1923 from Ireland – Home in Ireland – Farm life – Learning to sew
2. Bertha Devlin 1923 from Ireland – “Why did you leave Ireland?”
3. Bertha Devlin 1923 from Ireland – The crossing
4. Bertha Devlin 1923 from Ireland – More about the crossing
5. Bertha Devlin 1923 from Ireland – “What were the accommodations like?”
6. Bertha Devlin 1923 from Ireland – “coming into New York”
7. Bertha Devlin 1923 from Ireland – Arriving at Ellis Island

–Silver Lisa