What: For our group project we are going to create a scrapbook. A scrapbook is a book of blank pages for sticking clippings, drawings, or pictures in. The scrapbook is going to be designed exactly how we think Jefferson, Grant, or a character from the book would create it. We will be filling up the scrapbook with Jefferson’s important memories, moments, recipes, and his time in jail. In order to do this, we will be looking for symbols in magazines, things from the internet, clippings in newspapers and physical objects. Being in jail and confined to one place causes a person to use their imagination. Similar to Jefferson and Grant they are both trapped in situations that cause them to do a lot of imagining and thinking. Something our group will be doing in order to create the perfect scrapbook that represents “A Lesson Before Dying”.
Why: In the book “A Lesson before Dying” a lot of the book has to do with symbols and teaching. Jefferson is being taught a lesson by being sentenced to death. Grants job as a teacher is to teach and he is also asked to teach Jefferson how to become a man. Since teaching plays a huge role in this book, the scrap book will be created to teach others about our insights, thoughts, and main ideas about the book. We all thought it would be a good gesture to create a visual. This way our imagination and how we views things from the book can be brought to life.
So I love this idea. I actually think it has the potential to be a very beautiful and moving project.
The comments/questions I have are partly about logistics and partly about helping you tighten the content and conceptual work of the project:
-I like that you are picking up on the emphasis on education and teaching as a major theme in the book. (Indeed “lesson” is in the title.) I like that you want the form of your project to speak to that theme, but I wonder about the idea the loose parallel of the novel thinks about education and teaching and our book educates people. This seems to be too loose of a connection. Arguably all the projects will educate their audiences about something. In and of itself that parallel doesn’t actually engage the book’s specific consideration of schooling and education. What you need to do is ask yourself what exactly is the book doing with the theme of education? What tensions, questions, and even conclusions do you see it putting forth about education/school ? In relation to race? In relationship to community? In relationship to masculinity? or freedom? or anything else? Then you want to ask yourself how might our project in it’s particular book form illuminate and/or engage the way the novel addresses one of these questions and thinks about education and schooling.
I don’t know (b/c your group needs to talk about it), but I can imagine that the emphasis you want to put on Jefferson’s life your book might engage the theme by thinking about itself as the textbook Jefferson might use to teach Grant or the folk to teach the learned. In this way it would be as if you take the lesson the novel implies has been learn (at least in some beginning way) and you imagine what it might be to take that lesson to the fullest — a book that offers a whole “curriculum” of being “youman” (as opposed to say “man”).
-I’m wondering about the presentation of the book or how you imagine people interacting with the book. So if part of the assignment is to engage a community (however small or big) outside the class, I’m wondering how you will do so. The creation of the book is amazing, but if it only goes from your group to my desk it has not necessarily done the work of engaging a community. – But if you were to hold a workshop around the book in which you invited people to look at it and engage in discussion about a central question Gaines’s novel and your book raise, that would work. I know you mentioned a desire to actually make some of the food from the recipes you plan to include. Perhaps you might think of putting on a memorial hour for Jefferson during club hours? You could make food from the book. You could share the scrapbook for viewing at the service. You might plan to read a few excerpts from the scrapbook at some points. Perhaps you want to think about Jefferson as symbolic of black folk whom the legal and political structures of our nation have deemed less than hog as always as the one with no thinking power and no knowledge to offer. So perhaps in addition to reading passages from your scrapbook or from the novel, you might incorporate lines from the eulogies of other black/brown folks like Jefferson (i.e. Mike Brown or Till). You could even have a place for folks to sign or contribute to the scrapbook.
You don’t have to do this idea (though you’re welcome to it), but you see how it both addresses the concern about audience and helps you focus the question of objective or what the book will do?
While the logistics of the scrapbook are fairly straight forward (though still by no means something you should wait until the last minute on), the logistics of public engagement require some immediate thought. If you are going to host a specific event with a time and place, you need to reserve that place for that time asap! And you need to advertise soon.
If you are going to do a kind of guerilla event (i.e. instead of a memorial gathering, maybe you stage a memorial walk/march in which passages from the book and/or other texts are read throughout. If so you might not need to reserve space, but you will still need to advertise heavily, and you will need to recruit and coordinate people for the march/walk. For it to be notable, you’ll probably need a decent number of folks. Even still with the march if you plan for it to culminate in some place where you have food and people able to look at the book, you might need to reserve space or at least double check to make sure no one will kick you out if you end the walk there.