Hi everyone, my name is Cameryn Criscione and welcome back to my blog post! The text I will be focusing my research on is “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I have chosen this text because Emerson’s work explores the ideas of how experiences shape our lives, how growth can be scary and painful, but also how it is necessary, and why it is essential to choose truth.

I am gearing my teaching tool to fifth and sixth graders, depending on the state in which they live. I believe this lesson plan is best for the highest level of elementary school students because they will be going into a new school the following year, which can be scary for some of them. They need to recognize that this new setting will help them grow in new ways that are needed. I also think that this age level can best relate to the themes being presented throughout the reading. The Gardner’s intelligences that I plan to engage are linguistic, spatial, naturalist, intrapersonal, and interpersonal learners. I will use visual resources and create a lesson plan that asks students to respond creatively. I find independent work followed by group work to be highly effective.

As mentioned in my last post, I realize that Transcendentalism can be particularly difficult for students to understand. I also recognize that graspingthe Transcendental belief of nonconformity can be extremely beneficial for students to comprehend. That being said, my lesson would be to explain to the class in a brief lecture that Romanticism as a philosophical and cultural movement gradually replaced the Enlightenment era. I would make sure that I convey the main characteristics of Romanticism that include focus on the individual, a celebration of nature, and the reliance on emotion and intuition. Following this, I would allow students to design a poem titled “I am Self-Reliant” to allow them to be creative and to explain how the characteristics that they identify as what makes them “self-reliant” makes them independent and successful. We could even do this lesson outside to spark the interest of those who learn through the naturalist intelligence. Students will then share with the class what they came up with. This would be extremely beneficially to those who best learn through Gardener’s linguistic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal intelligences because students can use language in the form of writing and speaking, understand their inner selves, and ultimately can communicate their thoughts with others.

Another approach is to allow the student to choose a tenet of Transcendentalism like nonconformity, self-reliance, free thought, confidence, or the importance of nature and relate it to a Disney movie and explain how they see that belief displayed in the film. For example, self-reliance can be found in the movie The Beauty and the Beast. The movie starts with the song titled: “Belle”. The whole song is sung by the townspeople, and they are all saying how different Belle is from the rest of them. Belle is misunderstood and different, so Belle is showing that she is self-reliant. This type of work can be helpful for those who learn most by Gardener’s spatial intelligence. These students will have the ability to interpret visual images and put forth their ideas.

The challenges that I have encountered so far in my research is that the ideology of Transcendentalism can be hard for students to fully wrap their minds around. I have overcome these challenges by putting forth various activities that will empower students to become “self-reliant” and overall be successfully with the material that is being presented. Additionally, the pleasant discoveries that I have made is that this text can be analyzed and interpreted through many of Gardener’s intelligences.