Alternative Perspectives and Ship Breaker
Example Assignment: Grade 11 College English (ENG 3C)
Ship Breaker tells the story of Nailer, a teen who breaks down abandoned ships for copper and other valuable materials for financial gain, who is faced with a difficult moral dilemma. When his friend and him find a beached clipper ship, an expensive high-tech boat, they believe they have just found the means to save themselves from poverty. However, inside the ship they find a girl named Nita, a rich girl whose family owns the ship, and Nailer must decide whether to kill her and scavenge the ship for parts, or save her and risk remaining in a desperate situation with an abusive father. Nailer ultimately chooses to save Nita, but must turn his back on his father to return her to safety as he promises.
This novel has extremely strong focalization through the perspective of the main protagonist, and the reader is provided with an understanding of the dystopian future Nailer lives in through Nailer’s own circumstance. Using information from the text about other characters (such as Nita or Tool), students in this lesson will be asked to choose another character and describe what the world would be like through their focalization. This would involve considerations of character motivation and how the story would be different if told from alternate perspectives. Although rooted in information from the text, this could also lead into a reflection component where students could discuss the challenges involved in understanding alternative experiences to those explicitly presented in the novel. For example, Nailer’s father is depicted as a villain. However, the world Bacigalupi presents in one which could force the individual into challenging situations where morality becomes more ambiguous as people struggle to survive. An interesting reflection might consider what societal structures have forced Nailer’s father into his current circumstance.
While this text is fast-paced and not challenging to read, Bacigalupi is subtle in his world-building method. This lesson would not only involve teaching students how to pick up world-building hints that are often challenging to identify, but also help students apply their findings to something productive and creative. In this lesson, students must critically consider how societal structures shape personal experience. Students will be encouraged to reflect upon their own experiences to explain why they believe certain characters would experience the world differently from Nailer, and discussion throughout the project will involve considering multiple perspectives in both the novel and in contemporary society. This assignment can be given either as a summative assignment, or as a formative assessment done throughout the novel study through reflection journals. Complying with the way ENG3C courses are often executed, time requirements will vary depending on approaches taken to working through the novel.
Expectations Addressed in this Lesson:
Reading and Literature Studies, Overall Expectations:
| 1. Reading for Meaning: read and demonstrate an understanding of a variety of informational, literary, and graphic text, using a range of strategies to construct meaning; 4. Reflecting on Skills and Strategies: reflect on and identify their strengths as readers, areas for improvement, and the strategies they found most helpful before, during, and after reading. |
Writing, Overall Expectations:
| 1. Developing and Organizing Content: generate, gather, and organize ideas and information to write for an intended purpose and audience. |
Works Cited
Bacigalupi, P. (2010). Ship Breaker. New York: Little Brown.
Ontario Ministry of Education. (2007). The Ontario Curriculum Grades 11 and 12: English.
Retrieved from https://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/secondary/english1112currb.pdf
