We dove into the Worldbuilding Unit in English with the goal of answering the question:
“How well can you apply advanced narrative techniques to build a compelling story?”
Here’s a timeline of what we did throughout this Unit.
1. To examine what makes a great worldbuilding narrative, we read Octavia E. Butler’s “Parable of the Sower”. Although simple in language, the book plays on some powerful, dark themes.
Our class held group discussions to discuss the story arc and how Butler intensifies the plight of her characters. I was also able to practice analyzing by making post-it note annotations as I read the chapters.
2. ZoeyB, LillianC, and I teamed up to write a narrative treatment focused on a sci-tech world around a multi-sophont community.
There are multiple fantastical races, each with their traditionally assigned roles to contribute to the community. These include the Humans, who are responsible for most of the innovation in the world, and the Bengals, who are feline-like, rightstanding warriors protecting the scientists.
Our main characters are Iona, a human healer, and Emir, her adopted Bengal sibling who is responsible for protecting the family.
When a deadly fungus infiltrates the world (it drowns creatures that it comes into contact with in orange appendages), our protagonist, Iona, rushes to find better technology for a cure before more lives are lost.
3. The main goal of the research essay project was to connect real-world issues (social, cultural, political, economic, technological, or environmental) to themes presented in our worldbuilding narrative. Ideally, there would be an ongoing debate about the issue that we could comment on. In class, we read “They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing” by Cathy Birkenstein and Gerald Graff, which introduced academic writing as entering a conversation.
As for my topic, I latched into the theme of selected roles in my worldbuilding community and went down the rabbit hole of whether academic vs. vocational tracking in real world education is beneficial. Then as I looked into vocational training options at for-profit colleges, I read about the Corinthian Colleges exploiting their students’ fees. I decided to make the stigma around for-profit colleges my research topic.
Throughout the process of research, I learned about perspectives from the position of adult students who had experienced defraud by their institution, NPR reporters, and government officials like Senator Durbin of Illinois.
Ultimately, with insight from this research, we could go back to revise our worldbuilding treatments for them to be more focused, persuasive, and relatable to the audience.
I am currently revising my essay and plan to share it here once I’m done!
4. My worldbuilding treatment work and research writing work culminated in a pitch presentation: pitching these ideas to the audience (the entire Freestyle AM senior class, ~30 students) as if they were potential producers our work (in my case, a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel).
It felt daunting. However, I partnered with ZoeyB to give our presentation, and it was a lot of fun to work together. We figured out the most key points of our story to share and how to split it up. Once we got that down, the challenge was to reduce our presentation time to 5 minutes, between first sharing the title of the story and the Reflections section where we connected the story to our research essays. On a Wednesday morning before class, we practiced rehearsing at Peet’s Coffee.
I am proud of how we did. I would say we focused so much on the oral presentation that we didn’t leave quite enough time to the visual component of the presentation! (We were to use Adobe Express to create a slideshow showing original visuals that represent our world.) I’ve learned my lesson to distribute time evenly for future similar projects. 😅
On the days of the presentations, everyone dressed in business casual (I borrowed an outfit of my mom’s) to look professional. This is the first year that these projects were integrated in Freestyle’s English class. I’m excited for the new ideas that future seniors will create!
Click the image below to see our pitch presentation video! I enhanced it using Adobe After Effects for enlarging our visuals as well as Premiere Pro for improving the clarity of the audio (dehummer and denoiser).
