Hello readers!
I’m so happy to say that we’ve finished yet another project and completed another public exhibition to showcase our work! Our second humanities project was about worldview and “ The Outsiders”. To show our understanding of both these topics, we presented two tableau’s to a live audience. At the end of each project, we reflect on the entire project and how we’ve grown as a learner. We also answer our driving question: “What can the Outsiders teach us about worldview?”. But what exactly is worldview? What is the Outsiders about? And what in the world is a tableau? Stick around to find out some more!
When we first launched 🚀 into this project, we were told that we were going to be performing a tableau at the winter exhibition on December 15th, 2021. We were also going to be reading S.E. Hinton’s classic novel, The Outsiders and identifying the characters worldview as well as our own. The three building blocks for this project were:
🧱 how does worldview impact who we are?
🧱 what would the outsiders look like today
🧱 How can I act like an “Outsider”?
Well first things first, we had to read the novel. “ The Outsiders” was written by S.E. Hinton when she was in high school. The novel is about Ponyboy’s experiences as a 14 year old boy. Where he lives, there are two rival gangs; the Socs ( west side wealthy teenagers, high class ) and the Greasers ( east side teenagers, poorer, lower class). He belongs to the Greaser gang. Throughout the book he learns that all the fighting that the gangs do ( for fun ) is useless and doesn’t solve any problems. He also learns that he is much different than other Greasers.
For every chapter of the book, we would create one or two discussion questions for that chapter, and then we would have group discussion and ask each other our questions. You had to be prepared to ask follow up questions if the conversation thinned out. I was pretty good at this because we had done the same thing in seventh grade. Here are some of my favourite discussion question I made, to give you an idea of what I’m talking about:
Would Ponyboy still be a Greaser if his parents were still alive?
Do you think Johnny’s act of killing the Soc was truthfully right? Was it just for self defence?
Why do all the Greasers, except Darry, start smoking at a very young age?
Each group member took on a role to help depict the chapter. I was an artful artist, making a couple sketches of an important element in the chapter.
We were introduced to worldview as we read the book. Everyone has a worldview, yes, even you reading this! A simple definition of worldview is the goggles through witch we see the world. Anyway, I love this definition because it’s nice and simple. There are seven categories of worldview: knowledge, time, beliefs, society, values, geography and economy. As we pondered how our worldview impacted who we are, we started to create a mind map about our own worldview. Here is my MindNode:
Then we thought about what the outsiders would look like today, in 2021. To do this, we got in to our tableau groups and started a brainstorm. Then with our idea brainstorm, we chose some ideas to include in our movie trailer. We had to create an iMovie trailer using one of the pre- designed trailer templates. Our group used the “ adrenaline” template. The trailer had to transpose characters and themes form the book into the trailer. We followed our storyboard and filmed all of our scenes around the school. Honestly, I had envisioned our trailer to be way better than it was, but I guess it was hard to create a movie trailer with only 6 people. Let’s just say, I had seen the trailer, I wouldn’t have wanted to go see the rest of the movie. Still, I found it entertaining and challenging to film suspenseful scenes that didn’t look like we were just standing around crossing our arms acting like a gang.
Another proof of my work, is the individual movie poster that I made. I love the photo of me that I chose to represent one aspect of worldview; time. My movie poster represents time because in the novel, Johnny and Ponyboy spend a lot of time in the vacant parking lot starring up at the stars, hoping not to get jumped by some Socs. Sometimes, Johnny even sleeps there because his life at home is no better. I used my design skills from our advertising project to add deign elements to my movie poster. 
Then, we created a group movie poster in our tableau groups. This poster was going to printed out and on display at our exhibition. We used the poster of a recent movie that came out in theatres as our inspiration. 
Ours turned out nothing like the dune poster because putting all our profile photos made our poster look too busy and crowded. I feel like our final group movie poster could definitely be improved, if I ever had to redo it. I thought that our black lettering blended in with the background, so therefore was hard to read.
So the last things you need to know about before I piece it all together is a a tableau. So. What is a tableau? A tableau is like an act, it tells a story and expresses emotion, but it’s still, and you cant talk. That means the actors hold a pose for a period of time so that the audience can take it all in. In class, we practiced acting like an outsider with some drama and improv games.
Then, each group was assigned an important scene from the Outsiders. Our group got Johnny dying in the hospital. We practiced and practiced our two tableaus. The first tableau was a representation of the scene and characters in the 1960’s and the second was our interpretation of how we think this scene would look like in 2021. The two aspects of worldview we chose to represent in our tableaux were time and values. We chose time because you can see the old medical gear compared to the new medical technology in our 2021 transpose. We chose values because Ponyboy values his friendships, and comes to see his friend in the hospital rather than being with his family.
It’s too bad that I don’t have photos of us holding our tableau scenes because they would have been perfect documentation 😔. Anyway, I got photos of the set up of our area in the library and photos of the cleanup.
The exhibition was very long… we presented our tableau at least 20- 30 times to an actual audience, which was cool, because of covid-19 we couldn’t do gatherings like this before. I took a challenge and was our first speaker, to give the audience a brief on what they were about to see before we did our tableaus. Some change from the 1960’s tableau to the 2021 tableau were:
- We were all sad in the first one because Johnny had died, but due to new medical technologies and science advances, Johnny doesn’t die in the 2021 transpose, so we are all happier. I played Ponyboy, and so I covered my face like I was super shocked and sad in the first one, and in the second, I’m happier and taking a photo of me and Johnny.
- In the first scene the nurse is writing on a clip board with a pencil, in the 2021 transpose she is writing on an iPad with an Apple Pencil, to show technology advance throughout time.
There’s my group in our costumes:
Now to answer our driving question: “ What can the Outsiders teach us about worldview?”
Throughout our group book discussions, we talked about the characters in the book and how we can connect our own experiences to theirs. We learned about the seven aspects of worldview and were therefore encouraged to think of some of the characters worldview. For example, one of Ponyboy’s values is friendship. He values his friends and his gang, and he feels like he needs to protect his friends and stick up for them. Each character has a worldview, just like each person has a worldview. Another character in the book named Dally, had a completely different worldview because of his rough experiences ever since he was a boy. We believe or act differently based on our rooting worldview/ the goggles in which we see the world. By exploring the worldview of some characters in the book, we are pushed to identify some aspects of our own worldview.
Worldview is a pretty tough concept to learn, but by incorporating two aspects of worldview in our movie posters and tableaus, we are now able to recognize specific worldviews in the Outsiders.
Thanks for reading this very long portfolio post! I hoped you learned a couple things while reading.
Make sure to check out my tableau group’s blogs.