What's+Your+Perspective?

Section 5.3, (Instructional Strategy 9)
 * What's Your Perspective?**

Perspective is of imperative importance in literary texts. This activity asks students to actively analyze the perspective of a character other than the narrator or protagonist. In undertaking this task the students can glean a better understanding of the elements in play within a given task as well as developing a much more nuanced understanding of the character's and their motivations.
 * Rationale:**

The impact of the story's events on this character's life. The character's needs The character's concerns The character's emotional response to the events of the story
 * Instructions:**
 * 1) Have students undertake this activity after completing a reading.
 * 2) Have students identify the perspective from which the events are being told, whether that be the protagonist, a minor character acting as narrator, or an omniscient narrator.
 * 3) Then have students choose another character and prepare to analyze their perspective. Encourage students to be creative in this selection and to engage any visible player in the text they have read.
 * 4) Distribute the reproducible to students or simply ask them to cite down the following factor's in the character's experience:
 * 1) Once students have cited all the individual elements listed in the prior step, have them write a summary of the character's situation from that character's point of view.

This strategy is excellent particularly for its flexibility in application for varying levels of instruction. When used in relation to entry level language arts texts, students can gain a basic understanding of the level of complexity that each character adds to a text. Higher level literary study will reveal characters that act as allegorical stand-ins and whose perspectives and concerns are representative of entire philosophical schools of thought. This strategy allows students to reevaluate the interactions in any text and to construct a more manageable and valuable rendition of the exchanges therein.
 * Application to Language Arts:**