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I love using Socratic Seminars too.  It's really a combination of SS and Lit.Circles. The key is the question process and the levels of questions.  Level 1 are on the line questions; level 2 are between the lines -inference; and there are level 3 questions which are beyond the lines.  What if type questions that make them think beyond the text.  My students , even from the school I taught at with very low level students - enjoyed this because it made them feel smarter than they whad been treated previously.  I barely used it last year with Pre-AP students - but they also seemed to dig deep and ask really great questions related to the novels we were reading.

Speaking of Socratic Seminars or Symposiums, here are some great questions/topics I used with my 11th grade class when teaching Bless Me, Ulitma. Before we started, I went over the grading criteria that I was going to use. Surprisingly, everyone contributed substantively. I was so excited! This was a very shy inclusion class where most of the kids wanted to blend into the background. They were amazed that they could intelligently discuss literature with others and asked to do SSs more often.

1. The events of Bless Me, Ultima take place in the middle 1940s, during and immediately after World War II. How, if at all, is the war or this particular moment in history significant to the story the novel tells?

2. What role does the physical environment-the New Mexican landscape-play in Bless Me, Ultima? How do the novel's characters live in it and respond to it? Is the landscape used by the author to provide a realistic material backdrop to the events of the story? to carry particular symbolic or moral or aesthetic values? to do both?

3. Chapters 2, 4,7, 9, 11, 14, 20, and 22 of Bless Me, Ultima contain narrations of Antonio's dreams. What do these dreams tell us about Antonio? Do they develop or change significantly over the course of the novel? And what is the significance of the fact that dream sequences play such a large role in the novel's design?

4. Bless Me, Ultima may be viewed as a coming of age or rite of passage story, a story of a young person's education and development? Which aspects of Antonio's coming of age or rite of passage seem universal and which qualities or details are particular to his time, place, and culture?

5. Early in the novel, Anaya writes that the schoolhouse rose above the housetops to "compete with the church tower." Do you think that Catholicism or Christianity is in competition with other belief systems or sources of authority in Bless Me, Ultima? With secular education? Or with other sources of spiritual mystery and power such as those of the Golden Carp or of the curandera, Ultima, herself? What is the nature and purpose of these competitions, if that's what they are? Do you think the various sources of authority are reconciled or not? If not, what wins and what loses?

6. What is the significance of Antonio's friend Florence, the unbeliever, and of his death in the novel?

7. Is Rudolfo Anaya seeking in this novel to reflect on, or define, or recommend any particular understanding of or response to "good" and "evil" in the world? If you think he is not, why not? If you think that he is, what kinds of understandings and responses do you think the novel promotes?

8. Anaya's novel has also been viewed by some as not just reporting but reinforcing traditions of patriarchy and gender inequality in Mexican American families and communities? Is this a fair criticism? How are power and voice or voicelessness distributed among the male and female characters in the novel? Are traditional gender roles and power relations accepted by all or are they challenged anywhere or by anyone in the novel?

Dear all Teachers,

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Regards,

Andrew Nguyen