Chinese Philosophy, Poetry, and American Transcend

My admiration for American Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margret Fuller, led me to adopt many of their ideals into my own personal belief system. I was aware that Buddhism and Taoism significantly influenced the Transcendentalists; deepening both their reverence for nature and their desire to look inward, toward one's intuition, for the truth. However, I had yet to experience these ideals in Asian works of art until several of our professors shared with our class the the breath of literature that was created during the T'ang Dynasty, and in particular, the poems of Wang Wei and Li Po. Inspired by these poets, I created a Unit of Study that will work especially well in a World Literature class.


In re-reading this Unit, I can see where more can be done. I could supplement the poetry analysis activity with a graphic organizer. I could provide an outline with sentence stems to assist struggling students in writing their essays. I could strategically group students during the gallery walk into homogenous groups when they explore the tone of the Landscape Paintings, and then re-organize them into heterogeneous groups when they share their findings to learn different points of view from one another. furthermore, engaging students in activities such as Socratic Seminar, or creating student-generated questions are not simple tasks. They are acquired skill-sets students need to engage in often to gain confidence and mastery. In general, however, the nuts and bolts of this Unit are here with enough resources to run the lesson as is, but I look forward to refining it.
edited by mwatt on 1/16/2013