Hi, and welcome back to my blog. Assuming you read the title of this post, you probably have some questions. Firstly, how the heck is the book “The Outsiders” relevant to worldview? Secondly, what is “The Outsiders?” You will find out this and more in this post. 

First of all, I’m going to provide you with the driving question and an outline of what I will be talking about in this post. You should appreciate that. I am very generous. The first thing I will do in the post is give a very quick summary of “The Outsiders” and show the definition of worldview. This way you will know what I’m talking about when I name scenes, characters and different aspects of worldview. Then, I will talk about a few assignments we did within the project. After that, I’m going to talk about how the two relate. I’ll then talk a little bit about the winter exhibition and show some photos and videos. Finally, I’m going to answer the driving.

The driving question for this project was “How can the Outsiders teach us about worldview?”

We worked in groups. My group was: Keira, Mackenzie, Callum, and Daniel. Check out their blogs!

The Outsiders

The Outsiders is an old novel written by author S.E. Hinton. It follows the story of Ponyboy and the chain reaction set off by Darry (his brother) getting mad at him, and socs (the upper class) hating greasers (the lower class). When Darry got angry, Ponyboy went outside and found Johnny. Johnny and Ponyboy got jumped by socs, and the socs tried to drown Ponyboy. In order to save his life, Johnny killed Bob (the soc.) Johnny and Ponyboy ran away and stayed in a church for a week. At the end of that week, the church caught fire and Johnny and Ponyboy had to save kids from the fire. As a result, Johnny ended up hospitalized, and died. Dally (a good friend of theirs) ran away because of this, and died because he pointed a gun at a policeman and the policeman killed him. After this, Ponyboy was traumatized (obviously,) but he still needed to keep up with school. So when he was assigned an essay, he wrote about his experiences.

My Work

One of the assignments I had was to make a movie poster for The Outsiders. The economy aspect of worldview is demonstrated, regarding privilege and money, which are a huge part of the economy and society as a whole.

Another assignment we had was our worldview MindNode. This is basically a mind map of the different aspects of my worldview.  

How do worldview and “The Outsiders” involve each other?

This was a very popular question among me and my friends. Why did we read “The Outsiders” to learn about worldview? Why didn’t we read another book? Well, “The Outsiders” ties in very well to worldview because of all of the different points of view. On top of that, many outside things are influences many of the characters’ worldview in drastic ways. For example, when the socs jumped Johnny (the first time, before the instances in the book) Ponyboy began to view the socs as much more barbaric than he originally thought. His brothers, Darry and Soda, also influenced his worldview. Darry raised him to think, “greaser good, soc bad.” All in all, “The Outsiders” provides us a different point of view and an easy way to see how other’s actions can influence how you see the world.

The Exhibition

For this project, we did a presentation at the winter exhibition. We presented a tableau. A tableau is a still image. An easier way to describe it is a freeze frame. It’s almost as if you’re watching a scene and time stops. Our tableau was the court. We had to do two tableau’s: one from the original book, and one that’s been transposed into 2021. For example, our first tableau was the courtroom, with the judge closing the case. In the 2021 version, we had a social worker talking about the same things. For our tableau we created multiple props. This included a zoom call frame and an American flag (for the courtroom.) 

This post started with the driving question, and it’s also going to end with the driving question. How can the Outsiders teach us about worldview? Well, the Outsiders can teach us about how certain things influence worldview, such as experiences (Johnny getting jumped,) society (the greasers vs socs,) and many other things. We can also see that everyone has a different worldview due to experiencing different things that influence it. In conclusion, the Outsiders can teach us about worldview by showing different experiences that everyone’s gone through and how that changes who they are as a person as well.