75 pages • 2 hours read
William BellForbidden City
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Activities
Use this activity to engage all types of learners, while requiring that they refer to and incorporate details from the text over the course of the activity.
“Advocacy”
In this activity, students will reflect on advocacy in the novel and develop strategies to advocate for a cause in their own local or national governments.
Alex admires the fortitude of the student protesters who have been denied basic rights in their government. Consider issues in your local or national government and develop an advocacy strategy to address threats to personal freedoms. Compare your strategies to those of the student protesters in the novel. Consider these questions to guide your thinking.
- What injustices should be addressed in government systems?
- How might you inspire others to join your cause?
- What organization and planning may be required for advocacy?
- How can media be used to inspire change?
- What are simple strategies that can be used to advocate for a cause?
- What solutions can you develop to resolve an important issue?
Create a media presentation to share with peers describing your cause, the strategies you will use, and how they relate to the strategies used by the student protesters in the novel.
After class members have shared their presentations, compare the content of the presentations and consider the ways in which they might be connected by the novel’s themes.
Teaching Suggestion: Students may have difficulty thinking beyond the examples of hunger strikes and protests in the novel. Consider encouraging students to discuss different strategies for advocacy such as writing letters to local governments, organizing petitions, partnering with local organizations, raising funds, or volunteer work. Students can also think about short-term strategies that can lead to more long-term solutions—this perspective may help generate divergent ideas as well. Additionally, students may find it beneficial to discuss changes that should be implemented in society to help them generate ideas about potential areas of advocacy.
