Studnets create class quilt

Vernon — One challenge of teaching literature to teenagers is making a text come to life in the hands of inquiring students.
Marianne Longchamp’s sophomore English classes at Vernon Township High School, literally used their hands when they created class quilts to commemorate their reading of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Each student had to create a quilt square that both represented his and her uniqueness and reflected a theme from the classic story. The themes were: the power of narrative and voice, the power of strong relationships, the disruption of gender roles, the power of writing letters and the power of spirituality. Then they worked as a class to decide how those quilts would be placed together.
This reflects the novel’s theme of diverse people coming together in unity. They also had to include squares that represented five of the main characters in the novel, including Celie, Shug and Nettie.
The colorful quilts were displayed in the school’s hallway and were judged for their representation of the literature and their artistic appeal.