Spotlight on student seminars

In Mrs. Joanna Dallam’s AP English 12 class students must prepare a seminar to the class on a book they are reading. According to Dallam “Seminars are ongoing and every unit we have an anchor text. Students signed up at the beginning of the year to a certain text. They got choose their own groups, they got to decide who they worked with, they got to decide which text they wanted to approach, and then at the end of teaching that text they get to decide more or less how they want to provide a seminar and experience.”
One group included seniors Joe Hadaway, Joe Krause, and Lane Kavanagh, who signed up for Frankenstein. Hadaway states, “Our topic was about how Frankenstein could be alluded to the Titans and the Gods or God himself. And our project pretty much wanted to represent how he was created in the text.” The group did this by collecting dead animal parts from the butcher including chicken pieces and pig feet, tracheas from a cow, and a heart we dissected. We had some livers, and I think there was a kidney in there somewhere. Just all pieces from dead animals and two rotisserie chickens that were not cooked yet were the main cavities,” said Krause. The presenters  let their classmates sew parts together and make their own Frankenstein.
Krause claims “It was Frankenstein so we decide to resurrect him and make him out of dead animals. The main creativity aspect that got us an A was creating Frankenstein.”
Another group consisted of Jenna Boyd and Jasmine Coates. The text they presented on was The Importance of Being Earnest, a satirical play. According to Boyd “used inversions because Oscar Wilde used a lot of inversions throughout all of his works and we had the class create inversions about specific topics that we randomly chose and they could go any direction they wanted with it.”
The group also used Dallam as one of their topics which gave the students a chance to have fun. Boyd claims “They got to make fun of Mrs. Dallam a little bit and I think they really liked it.”
Dallam believes “A seminar should be an experience,  a way for their classmates to really make a memory. My goal is that five years from now people will look back and say “Oh my gosh, do you remember that Frankenstein seminar, that was so crazy.”