海归初中部的英语语言与文学课程一直深受孩子们喜爱。最近的一个单元，我们在探索“历史小说”，为达成基于概念的理解，我们创建了贯彻整个单元学习的探究说明：历史小说的作者常常创造性地把故事背景设定在那些改变人类历史进程的大事件中。透过这种叙述，我们把自己投射到不同的时间与空间，来体认个人命运、理解人类发展历程。

我们聚焦调研了维多利亚时期的一些社会生活图景，然后阅读这一时期的文学代表作——阿瑟·柯南·道尔爵士的《巴斯克维尔的猎犬》。这是一部很受欢迎，可读性强的作品，同时难度也比较适合初涉英国文学原著的学生。我们仔细阅读了小说的前几章，同时研究维多利亚时代的伦敦以及后来的英格兰西南部荒野生活是何种样貌。这有助于将我们把对故事的诠释置于当时的历史背景中，并进一步思考作者是如何构建故事背景的。如故事主人公侦探福尔摩斯站出来评论的：“荒凉、死气沉沉的沼地……这个场景可太合适上演悲剧了，如果魔鬼真想插手人间事务的话。”

探究故事情节是重要而有趣的部分，我们在学校的公共展示区域做了一块互动板“让我们一起做侦探”，上面有绳子和别针，这样学生在阅读小说的时候就可以在上面添加线索，让学习协作可视化，也增强体验趣味。你可以从下面的图片中看到，我们玩得很开心:

我们研究了女性和外国人形象在维多利亚时代的文学作品中（包括福尔摩斯系列探案集）是怎样被塑造与刻画的，如何看待里面的大英帝国视角。这带来了一些比较有挑战的话题思考，如：帝国主义、性别歧视、种族主义和鸦片战争等。在研读文学作品的过程中探讨这些问题，学生有机会考虑不同视角的观点、练习如何识别偏见并检视那些自己先入为主的假设。这是一个培养批判性思维能力的过程，也是他们探索当前社会问题的历史根源，培养同理心和理解力的过程。

探索维多利亚时期的社会历史问题对学生来说是比较有挑战的，我们运用“情绪板”来记录探究过程：学生把《巴斯克维尔的猎犬》中反映的那个时代的事件，作品中描述的时代元素，课上的讨论以及自己做的调查统统收集、记录下来。之后，他们将创作自己的维多利亚小故事，而这些记录将帮助他们设定更真实的故事背景。下面是一些同学的“情绪板”作品，是不是 非常有看点？

OCAC’s English Language and Literature (ELL) classes were expanded at the start of our Unit 2 this academic year, enabling greater numbers of students to take part in our interesting exploration of the historical fiction genre.

The IB is built around statements of inquiry, which for this unit was:

Writers of the GENRE OF HISTORICAL FICTION can shed light on our ORIENTATION IN SPACE AND TIME by using SETTING CREATIVELY to help us better understand and learn from the events which have shaped history.

We focused on the Victorian period as the historical context for our research and read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles as an example of literature from that time. This choice of text had the twin advantages of being a relatively easy read and being a very popular story, with both advantages making the unit more readily accessible to students who were new to English literature studies. We studied the first few chapters of the novel in some detail, looking for evidence of what life must have been like in Victorian London and, later, out on the moors of southwest England. This helped to situate our interpretations in the historical context and consider how the author constructed the setting for the story. Even the main protagonist, the famous detective Sherlock Holmes, remarks on “the desolate, lifeless moor…the stage upon which tragedy has been played” and he concludes that “the setting is a worthy one. If the devil did desire to have a hand in the affairs of men—”

To aid our study of the detective story, we created a detective board, complete with string and pins, on one of the school’s public display boards so students could add clues to it as we read the novel. We had some fun with this as you can see from the pictures below:

During this unit, we looked at how women and foreigners (from a British Empire perspective) were typically depicted in Victorian literature, including in the Sherlock Holmes stories. This led to consideration of challenging topics such as imperialism, sexism, racism and the opium wars. By grappling with such issues in literature, students can develop their critical thinking skills by considering different perspectives, identifying bias and exploring their own preconceived assumptions. They will also be reflecting on the historical roots of ongoing social issues, developing empathy and understanding.

Students documented their exploratory journey through the challenging sociohistorical issues of the Victorian period by creating a ‘moodboard’. The idea was that they should collect facts and descriptive elements from The Hound of the Baskervilles, our classroom discussions, and their own research. They would then be able to use these moodboards to inform their own creative writing to evoke the feeling of being emersed in the historical context of the Victorian period. The results were quite impressive and some of the students’ moodboards, pictured below, are certainly worthy of praise.

These excellent moodboards really helped the students to focus on their summative assessment, which was to create the setting for their own Victorian era mystery story in the format of a “penny dreadful”. The penny dreadfuls or penny bloods were cheap booklets containing serialized stories of adventure, the supernatural, crime and detective work. They became popular in early 19th century Britain thanks to improvements in printing technologies and literacy rates. This provided a very convenient format for the students’ summative assessments because they did not need to complete the whole story. In class, we looked at the idea of ending an episode of a story as a cliffhanger to encourage the reader to buy the next issue of the penny dreadful and students tried to put this into practice in their writing.

Below are examples of the students’ penny dreadfuls, starting with the intriguing covers based on our studies of the genre:

And now, let’s take a peek inside a few of them to appreciate some of the descriptive work, the hints that situate the writing in its historical yet fictional setting, and evidence of the cliffhanger endings to entice the reader to buy the next installment:

Some of the students’ ideas for their stories were fantastic and we strongly felt their work was worthy of celebrating and sharing, so the English Department displayed some of these penny dreadfuls on our official notice board so other students would be able to appreciate them.

Overall, this proved to be an especially interesting and rewarding inquiry-based project and, through this creative process, we all learned a lot about the research required to create the mood to evoke a convincing and accurate historical setting in a work of fiction.