Craft Lesson - Perspective/Point of View in Persepolis

Materials:
· History Textbook or Text on the Islamic Revolution
· Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Purpose: To help students understand the impact of using different perspectives. Help students analyze perspectives and bias when reading historical and other texts.

Lesson:
Completely discussion based lesson. Read both texts.

Teacher: Class, can you help me understand what point of view or perspective is?
Prompts – a way of seeing things, reflection on events, an opinion
Definition:
Point of View
1. a specified or stated manner of consideration or appraisal; standpoint

2. an opinion, attitude, or judgment

3. the position of the narrator in relation to the story, as indicated by the narrator's outlook from which the events are depicted and by the attitude toward the characters.

Perspective
1. the state of one's ideas, the facts known to one, etc., in having a meaningful interrelationship

**Definitions retrieved from http://dictionary.reference.com

Now let’s take a look at the texts:
HISTORICAL TEXT or TEXTBOOK
Leading Discussion Questions:
What perspective is this text written from?
o Prompts: historical perspective, very factual (“Just the facts ma’am. Just the facts.”), no emotion or feeling at all, no detailed descriptions, limited visual representation
How does that perspective help you understand the time period and events?
o Prompts: helps us understand the technical details of the events and time period, provides an overview to work from
Why is this type of text important?
o It does provide us with the factual information from which to work and gives a broad overview of the things that occurred.
Is there any bias in this type of text?
o There can be – think of Persepolis pages 44 & 73 where they are tearing pages out of the history book and closing universities so that students are not “led astray”.
o How does bias get into this type of text? You would think the facts are generally pretty unbiased…
§ Government influence, writer bias, editorial bias
§ Think of other events where this might have occurred - Holocaust, Indian relocation, discovery of the Americas, establishment of the United States of America, etc.

PERSEPOLIS
Leading Discussion Questions
What perspective is this book told from?
o Prompts: 1st person, child/teenager, female, clinical; Is it also historical, factual??
How does this perspective add to your understanding of the events?
o Prompts: provides emotion, feelings, first-hand account of the events
Why is this type of text important?
What does it provide that the other does not? What does the other provide that this perspective does not?
o Prompts: a link to the emotional humanity of the events, a deeper understanding than simple facts can provide, an in-depth look
What bias is there in this type of text?
o Quite a lot, because you are only seeing one side of the story.
o A child’s point of view could be skewed due to parental protection, misunderstanding of events, misinterpretation of words, events, expressions, etc.
o Removed because this is being written by a woman who is looking back at her childhood growing up in this era instead of being written at that exact time, like Diary of Anne Frank. Therefore, she has had time to interpret the events in a mature way

Wrap-Up: What is the importance of reading multiple perspectives on a topic? How does looking at things from several perspectives help us make more informed decisions and take thoughtful stances?

TEKS: Social Studies: High School: World History: Standard 25; English III: Standard 7, 8, & 11