Skip to Main Content

Section 2: Section Diagnostic

Prompt

For the Section 2 Diagnostic, you will submit a portfolio of work that showcases your understanding of the historical meaning of Orwell’s allegory and its relationship to your character’s retelling of the narrative.

Portfolio Questions

  1. Why and how did Orwell satirize the historical and political context in which Animal Farm was written?

  2. In what ways does learning about that context change or expand your understanding of the allegory and a selected character’s symbolic role in it?

  3. How might that character retell the storyline of Animal Farm in a first-person narrative?

Portfolio Pieces

Your portfolio should include the following:

  1. Your Totalitarianism and 20th-Century History K-W-L Charts (Lessons 1 and 2)

  2. Your explanation of an evidence-based claim (short response) about your character’s allegorical significance and symbolic representation of a historical counterpart in response to the following question (Lesson 3, Activity 4):

    • If Animal Farm is seen as an allegory about totalitarianism and Stalin’s rigid control of the Soviet Union, what or whom might your character represent symbolically?

  3. Your Animal Farm Storyboard Tool in which you outlined your retelling of the Animal Farm storyline and wrote sentences from your character’s point of view (Lesson 5)

  4. A working draft of your character’s first-person narrative built from your storyboard plan and the narrative vignettes you wrote in Sections 1 and 2 (Lesson 6)

  5. A reflective narrative (Lesson 8) in which you do the following:

    • Tell the story of your developing understanding of Animal Farm, its historical allegory, and your character’s symbolic role in the novel

    • Explain your initial interpretation of the story in Section 1 and how learning about the historical context represented in the novel changed or expanded your understanding

    • Analyze your character’s symbolic role in the allegory and explain how your claim (Lesson 3), your storyboard for a first-person retelling of the novel’s storyline (Lesson 5), and your draft narrative from your character’s point of view (Lesson 6) reflect your analysis

Guiding Questions

Use the following questions to help you evaluate and prepare your portfolio of evidence:

K-W-L Charts

Ask yourself the following questions about your entries on your tool:

  • Do I respond to the guiding questions listed on the chart in the corresponding column?

  • Do I note relevant and sufficient textual details to address the guiding questions?

  • Are the ideas and questions I have related to the texts I am reading?

Explanation of an Evidence-Based Claim

Does your explanation do the following:

  • State a clear claim that communicates your character’s role in the story and their allegorical significance?

  • Explain your analysis of your character?

  • Use textual evidence from Animal Farm to support your claim?

Animal Farm Storyboard Tool

  • Do you provide descriptive words or phrases about your character that you identified in Section 1? These may come from your Character Note-Taking Tool.

  • Do you provide descriptive words or phrases about your character that you identified in Lesson 5?

  • Do you provide the claim you wrote in Section 2, Lesson 3, about your character’s symbolic role in the historical allegory?

  • Do you provide descriptive words or phrases that you think represent your character’s personality, voice, and point of view based on your new understanding of the novel and its historical context?

  • Do you provide one or two first-person lead sentences for each line of the storyboard? How well do they represent how you think your character would view the events of the story outlined by Woodhouse and retell them in the character’s voice?

  • Do you identify where the plot events (narrative vignettes) you described from your character’s point of view (in Lessons 9 and 10) might fit into the sequence?

  • Do you include key plot developments that are not represented by Woodhouse, and did you record entries for them in the Woodhouse sequence?

First-Person Narrative from Character Point of View

  • Does your narrative clearly identify, introduce, and represent the personality, voice, and symbolic role of your character?

  • Does your narrative describe the major plot developments of the story from your character’s point of view (as identified on the Animal Farm Storyboard Tool)?

  • Does your narrative demonstrate your understanding of Orwell’s allegory and the characteristics of totalitarian societies he satirized?

Reflective Narrative

Address the following questions in a written response:

  • What were your initial questions and predictions about the book?

  • What did you discover and think about as you read Animal Farm?

  • Why and how did you focus on your character’s role in the allegory?

  • How did you interpret your character’s point of view and represent it in your first-person narratives?

  • How did your understanding of the book develop further as you learned about totalitarianism and the historical context in which the novel was written?

  • What did you learn about language and rhetoric and their use to influence an audience’s thinking?

  • What final conclusions have you drawn about the meaning of the allegory and your character’s symbolic role in it?

  • What are the connections among your interpretation of the allegory, your claim about your character’s symbolic role, and your storyboard plan for a first-person retelling of the story from your character’s point of view?