Adaptation and Curriculum for Excellence

Adaptation v2.0!

It’s been a busy start to the Summer term here at Inveralmond, with exam season firmly upon us: the Standard Grade kids have now sat their final exam in English, while my Higher class are studying furiously (I hope!) for their big day on the 12th.

Safe beneath the fray, though, 2Y2 have been working away quite happily on their adaptation project.

This post will be an update on the first two weeks of term, which have seen us complete our work on comics and make a start on our second adaptation text – Neil Gaiman’s Coraline.

Tom Foster Visit

We started with a bang this term, with Scottish graphic and comics artist Tom Foster visiting the class on our first day back.

Tom delivered a really interesting session, using a huge range of images to show the various stages in his creative process: from initial ideas through to pencilling, inking and colouring final proofs.

Although Tom’s primarily an artist, he also offered some real insights into the writing style of comics greats like Alan Moore. It was great to reinforce the concept of just how closely language and image must work together in comics – this collaborative aspect was one of my favourite features of our own Jekyll & Hyde strips.

Two other highlights for me:

•    Tom was able to show each ‘group’ in our class (the pencillers, inkers, colourists, letterers...) how different artists might approach the same scene with vastly different results – a cool reminder that every aspect of comics production is very much a creative process.

•    He also took the time to discuss the pupils’ comics and to make links between some of the ideas and techniques they had used and the work of industry pros. The kids took a lot of confidence from this and it was a reminder to me to try the same thing with other types of texts created in class.

There’s just no substitute for expertise and working with creative professionals like Tom, or John and Sandra from Metaphrog, has been of huge benefit to the class – and to me as a teacher. I’ve enjoyed reading Lucy’s blog about her pupils’ brilliant experiences with poet Lydia Robb and artist Paola McClure, too - we’re both really lucky to have had these opportunities and I would strongly recommend checking out SBT’s Live Literature Funding to any teacher interested in bringing writers into the classroom.

In a similar vein, the resources from SBT’s Virtual Writer In Residence Cathy Forde, are also a great way to get a writer’s take on approaching creative writing in class – check them out!

Adaptation and Curriculum for Excellence

 
Like most departments up and down the country, we’ve been doing a lot of planning this year in preparation for the launch of the new curriculum in August. 

There are lots of interesting ideas being developed, and on a national level I think the LTS website is doing a really good job of exemplifying potential approaches.

There’s still uncertainty around, though – not least in my classroom! Looking back over the last term, though, I’d say the work on adaptation is the closest I’ve come to feeling fully confident that what I’m doing is relevant.

If anybody would like a copy of the unit plan, linked to the experiences and outcomes, just give me a shout. Here are just a few thoughts on why I think it works:

•    Comics and graphic novels are included under the new definition of ‘texts’ and I’m more confident that learning how they ‘work’ represents a valid interpretation of literacy
•    There’s been a strong emphasis on active learning and creativity, with pupils taking increased responsibility for the development of their own ideas
•    We’ve made a cross-curricular link with Art & Design, and brought those skills into English
•    Much of the work has been collaborative, with pupils taking on specific roles and working with others to solve design problems
•    Publication online (on this blog!) has given our work a genuine sense of purpose and audience

So hopefully I’ve got at least one planned unit sorted for next year! That still leaves a lot of empty space in the planner, though...what else is happening out there, folks?

It would be great to hear how other teachers and departments are planning to approach CfE after the summer – and I know we’d all love to share the resources! Get in touch, either by commenting here or on our glow group…

Coraline    

Anyway, onwards and upwards. Having decided to read Coraline as our next adaptation text, the big question was – which version?

Maybe fittingly for a book in which the ‘other’ plays such a significant role, Coraline now exists in lots of ‘other’ forms: as a graphic novel, a feature film, a video game…and even as a stage musical!

I’m hoping to look at the ways in which a novel can become a screenplay, first of all, and move on from there to look at how video games can be scripted.  As ever, any help or suggestions would be gratefully received!

The real adaptation work on Coraline will be kicking off this week. So far we’ve been concentrating on reading and enjoying the novel, and working through more ‘traditional’ text based activities such as close reading questions and character studies.

We did, however, take a look at some extracts from the excellent graphic novel, adapted and illustrated by P Craig Russell, which formed a nice bridge between the novel and last term’s work.

 
We were able to have some interesting discussions about how we’d approach key moments – like this one, in which Coraline first discovers the ‘other’ world – in comics design. We then took a look at the published graphic novel  and chatted about what creative decisions had been made, and why.

I was struck by how comfortable the kids were with media terms in discussing the ‘shots’ on display here – their first year teacher’s done a good job! This will come in really useful when we move on to look at storyboarding and screenwriting later in the term.

Great Coraline Resources Online!

As ever, I’ll be posting the resources we produce for our work on Coraline as we move through the project.

For now, I’d like to share some of the brilliant stuff that’s already out there, and which I’ll definitely be using!

First, bookstream has a wonderful mini-site devoted to the novel, with a synopsis, reviews, chapters available to read online and really cool video interviews with Neil Gaiman.

As a teacher, I’ve been so grateful for the development of fun, engaging and interactive websites to accompany movie releases -  the ‘Golden Compass’ site became essential to a unit I taught on ‘His Dark Materials’, and for a year the ‘Vantage Point’ site was THE way I taught narrative perspective!

All things must pass, I suppose, and these sites are gone now, but there are currently TWO excellent and complementary sites devoted to the Coraline flick:

Coraline Movie
Film Focus - Coraline

Both sites are great fun to explore, and there are various downloads, behind-the-scenes videos and interactive elements to discover.

The characters and settings from the novel are all here, and have made for really effective introductions to lessons on those aspects.

My favourite has to be the ‘Other Mother’s Workshop’ at coraline.com, where you can stitch buttons over your own eyes and become your ‘other’ self – here’s the other Mr Stephenson!

         
Brilliantly, the second site has Henry Selick’s full screenplay available to download as a pdf.

Equally brilliantly, Graham Annable has made some of his storyboards (like the sequence on the left) for the film available on his ‘gricklethings’ blog.


These are going to be invaluable teaching resources for the class.

We definitely found, when adapting our scenes from Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde, that it was important to have the ‘model’ of the Grant/Kennedy graphic novel to refer to and learn from.  In a similar way, I hope that being able to study extracts from the REAL storyboards and screenplay will help to develop not only our media literacy, but also our confidence and creativity in tackling this latest adaptation challenge!

Going to close with a plea - again! It would be great if we could  share any good resources, links or ideas you have around storyboards and screenwriting, either for general use or for specific texts.

I’m also really keen to go on and look at how scenes from Coraline might be presented as a script for a video game, and I’ve been doing some research into how this might work.

If anyone out there has experience of this, though, we would all LOVE to hear about it!

All the best for now,
Michael

P.S: Video Game:

Two texts I’m finding really useful are:

• Les Pardew’s Beginning Illustration and Storyboarding for Games
• Lee Sheldon’s Character Development and Storytelling for Games