Lesson video

Welcome to today's English lesson.

I'm Mrs Crompton.

Our focus today is considering the writer's perspective.

You will need a pen and paper.

Take a moment to make sure you've cleared any distractions away and have everything you need to hand.

To begin with, let's just remind ourselves of the areas that we focus on when considering unseen nonfiction reading material.

Summarising, considering thoughts and feelings, considering the writer's perspective, which is our focus today, the writer's methods, and then big picture ideas.

To begin with then what we're going to do is just to have a little bit of a recap on Bird's feelings within the extract before we start to have a look at the text as a whole, and start to consider her perspective.

I've got three questions for you today.

My first question is how does Bird feel about the sites she sees in the market? And what I'd like you to do is to have a look down the first column and select the word that you think best describes Bird's reaction to the Bazaars of Baghdad.

Pause for a moment, write down your answer, resume when you're ready.

Welcome back.

So question two and now I think to look at the middle column of the screen and again the instruction will be to listen to the question, pause, select one of the words.

So this time we're going to have to do a little bit of inferring.

So this wasn't literally said within the extract.

She doesn't say, I feel like this book, the question is how does Bird feel about her relationship with the people of Baghdad? What sort of dynamic did you consider that to be within the extract? Would you describe Bird as being powerless, fearful? She had a sense of superiority.

She was awestruck or was she a person who was privileged and that was an interesting word.

It could be that she considers herself to be of a more privileged status, or you could choose to interpret that word as meaning that she felt privileged to have the opportunity to meet them.

So pause at this point, to answer the question, how does Bird feel about her relationship with the people of Baghdad? And welcome back.

Our final question is to consider her feelings towards the end of the extract.

And the question is how does Bird feel about the inequality that she sees within Baghdad? Is she pragmatic? So she just deals with things in a really sensible, realistic way.

Is that the best word to describe her response? Is she overwhelmed by it? Is she resigned to it? Now resigned is similar to pragmatic in terms of meaning, but the alteration comes from the idea that when you are resigned to something you give up, it's not so much that you're sensible about that you have actually given up a little.

Is she was respectful? Does she demonstrate a respect for the fact that this is a different community and she doesn't understand it? Or is she actually quite distanced from the whole thing that she doesn't even try and comment too much that she stands back and you would best describe her response to the inequality as an outsider's perspective.

Pause the video, complete your response.

And I would say at this point, take that extra moment to pause and take down any vocabulary that you find useful that you haven't used before.

Okay over to you resume when you are ready.

And welcome back.

So our focus today is to look at Isabella Bird's perspective.

And perspective is all about the angle with which she is producing her writing.

So that angle, that viewpoint is formed by things that are in her character and things that she has experienced.

Now let's find out a little bit more about Isabella Bird.

What we'll do is have a look at some information.

I will direct you as to where you should be looking.

And then there will be opportunities to pause and record your ideas as we go.

Isabella Bird was born in Yorkshire, 1831 to 1904 at her days.

She suffered with ill health as a child and in 1850 had a tumour removed from her spine.

The operation was only partially successful.

She continued to experience pain and also suffered with insomnia and depression.

The doctor suggested that she travel and in 1854, her father gave her one hundred pounds and told her she was free to travel wherever she wanted.

She spent several months visiting Eastern Canada and the United States.

On her return she used the letters she had to her sister as the basis for her first book, The Englishwoman in America.

Okay.

What do we need to know to help us understand Isabella Bird's viewpoint? Well, from the first slide impressed as I am, though she is a fellow Yorkshire woman.

That's not really the best piece of information for me.

However, knowing that this is a woman who has been through quite a major surgery, having a tumour removed and is still suffering with pain and insomnia and depression tells me something about her character.

So the first piece of information I am going to take is this piece of information about her ill health.

Now the next thing that draws my interest is the fact that the father gives her a hundred pounds and a hundred pounds would be a large sum so it's not that the amount of time shocked her, he tells her to travel and it's the distance she actually goes.

And that might not seem so dramatic towards we'd probably get as far as away as we possibly could too.

But for a young woman in 1854.

And I'm thinking about the context here to go to Canada and the United States on her own is a huge decision.

So that's the second thing I'm noticing about her character.

Finally, is the information about what she does on her return.

She doesn't just come back and that's it.

But she uses the letters that she had written to her sister to write a book.

Again, something about the nature of this woman.

She does something different on each occasion.

She pushes and does the best that she can with the situation perhaps initially.

But by the end of it, she is quite innovative and decides that she's actually going to write.

And I like that about her.

So I'm starting to form an impression of quite a determined young woman.

Okay.

Pause at this point to take down any notes or ideas that you need resume when you're ready.

Let's have a look at some more information about Isabella Bird.

And there she is on the right hand side, during one of her travels to the far East.

Bird went on to travel to Japan, India, and the middle East.

as well as recording her travels and becoming a respected figure in the geographical world she contributed to the community she visited.

In India she established a hospital in the memory of her sister and after seeing atrocities against the Armenians in the Middle East, she met with the then prime minister, William Gladstone, and spoke to a parliamentary committee on the issues.

Okay.

What else do we learn? Pause, take down your ideas resume when you are ready.

And welcome back.

So Isabella Bird did a lot of travelling and also had quite a of influence and was willing to use that influence to benefit others.

Let's try and capture our thinking.

On the screen you can see five words, determined, resilient, pioneering, subversive, and compassionate.

What type of character is Isabella Bird? I would like you to pause at this point, read the words, look at the definitions, record any new words to you to add to your vocabulary and to add to your learning experience today.

And I would like you ultimately then to select three words that you feel best describe the character of Isabella Bird.

Pause the video resume when you're ready to continue.

And welcome back.

Now, a further thing that we're going to consider in order to establish the viewpoint is to think about the world in which Isabella Bird was living.

It's not like ours.

And what we're going to do is to particularly get to know what this travel writing genre was all about and how Isabella Bird fits within that genre.

Let's have a look at the first screen.

And what you can see is that I have picked out a few ideas in blue, so that those are going to form the basis of any notes that you take.

Let's read together.

Fuelled by transport improvements and expanding British global influence, Victorian travel writing emerged in the period as a commercially popular and successful genre.

Increasing popular interest in scientific, geographical and anthropological research meant that travelogues could serve as accounts of individual experiences and instructions for future travellers.

Okay, let's look at this one together.

So what was happening with travel writing? Why was there an explosion in travel writing as a genre? and what is travel writing as a genre? Let's have a look.

First of all, the why.

Why? Because they could travel transport improvements.

They are suddenly able to cross the globe far more easily and so the Victorians started to travel more.

In addition, let's think about the fact that this is a time of the empire, the British empire exists and therefore Britain had a global influence.

So it was appropriate for them to be travelling to these places where they had an interest or influence.

So that's partly why.

On top of that, we have got other advances going on.

Science, geography, anthropology anthropology is the study of society, communities.

Victorians travelled so that they could learn more.

And that meant that travelogues slightly different perhaps to a modern day travel writer.

They not only recorded experiences, but they were almost like instruction manuals or educational books for future travellers.

So that tells us a little bit about the tone of Isabella Bird's writing and where she's fitting into the conventions of the genre.

Pause the video at this point, take down your notes from the slide and your understanding of the why, why did Victorian Travel Writing explode as a genre? Welcome back.

So now what we're going to think about is a further perspective that we need to consider.

And that says the fact that Isabella Bird was a woman.

And women and their situation in the 19th century is very different to women now.

So we need to understand the context of writing.

Let's have a look together.

Women began to travel in the 19th century for many personal and political reasons.

Some women sought further a cause like missionary work while others travelled to satisfy personal curiosities of exotic lands.

So it's not on the screen.

However, we do need to bear in mind this is a particular class of Victorian woman who has the money and the means to travel.

And she might want to go and do some voluntary work, becoming a missionary and helping out in a community.

Or she might just want to travel for personal curiosity, which I think is why Isabella Bird sets off originally.

And then we find this real influence that she has within the field of Geography.

So that's the first part, personal and political reasons.

Secondly, let's consider the next piece of information.

The masculine tradition of travel writing was considered to reflect public and professional concerns.

Whereas the feminine tradition was considered to fall into the private and personal sphere.

For example, Victorian females were allowed access to certain communities that men were not therefore enabling them to act as pioneers in studies of native people.

So the genre itself is dominated by men.

That's not a huge surprise to us, is it? We know for example, that famous writers, novelists like the Bronte Sisters had to write as men in order to get published originally.

So, there is still a masculine dominance within the world of the Victorian ladies.

So that's the starting point.

However, when they did start to travel, it turned out that what they were writing about was slightly different to the men.

So that offers the women a new opportunity to be a pioneer, the first to do something.

And they were particularly focused on writing about community and writing about personal reflections and experiences.

Okay pause the screen, take down your notes, resume when you're ready.

Now let's look at this.

This is a critique This is a criticism where we are now looking back on this travel writing.

And I've just told you a positive that they were able to do something new and different.

However, let's look at what this critique says to us.

The female gaze.

So this female viewpoint that they brought however, was often compromised as they took on the voice of Western masculine society and objectified rather than identified with the communities.

The women regained their power through race.

Which was lost at home because of gender.

Now, this is a really quite complex idea, but I think we're ready to engage with this.

When the women are writing, they are mimicking the style of the male travel writers.

Which means that they take on a language and an attitude to describe the communities that they are experiencing, that perhaps objectifies rather than sympathises communicates, or really describes what they're seeing.

So they end up perhaps creating a voice that isn't authentic.

And what's happening here, according to the second part of the statement is that the women who have now got a new found power through travelling and doing something as pioneers, then somehow take on this role of an oppressor too, because through being white females from Western society, they have a higher status and therefore a power through their writing that the communities that they are going into do not have.

So it's an interesting modern critique of what was happening within the Victorian periods.

So that you've got almost like a perpetuating cycle.

One group affords some liberation, but it then transfers the oppression onto somebody else.

And you know, it's not necessarily a really obvious oppressive voice, but it is however, a very narrow viewpoint.

So take on board some of those ideas, pause take down your notes, particular phrases like female gaze, the women regain that power through race, take on the voice of Western masculine society are going to help you.

Take those down resume when you're ready.

Now, let's bring all of that thinking together with a little bit of reflective writing.

We've got three statements.

Victorian female travellers such as Isabella Bird found new freedoms through their travel What did they find? What did they do? How would the women pioneers is the second sentence, but then we're also going to record the modern criticism of the writing.

What is a criticism? Pause the video at this point use the sentence stems, complete your reflection resume when you're ready.

And welcome back.

So we're now ready to look at our a piece of perspective writing.

And what we need to remember that when we are talking about perspective, our writing is going to include the following ingredients.

We're going to make a statement about the perspective that's taken.

We are going to have a combination of supporting evidence.

That's the evidence that backs up the statements and rich evidence that's the evidence that we then analyse further because that is more to be offered at an interpretive level.

We're going to look at words and their effect and linking to the writer's methods.

Finally, we are going to explain our ideas in relation to the focus of the questions.

So those are the four skills.

So what is our question today? Why does Bird travel to Persia? What is her perspective? We're going to do the following.

Repeats a formula that we used when we looked at on dark sheet if you've been working with me throughout the sequence, if not, not to worry, we're going to do this any way.

And I have got all of the same sentence starters ready for you.

So we're going to write an overview statement based on one that I have given you as a model.

And then you have a series of sentence starters to help frame the structure of your perspective writing.

Let's have a look together.

So your writing frame helps you to establish the overview, track the changes, and then conclude by referring back to the overview again.

The extract is from Bird's travelogue journeys in Persia and Kurdistan.

She recounts her experience of a Bazaar in Baghdad, commenting on the merchandise, the people and their lives.

As a female Victorian traveller Bird's perspective.

This is where your preparation work that you've just been doing will be inserted.

Okay.

So I've given you the starting point.

I then want you to add in your understanding of the perspective that is specific to Bird being a female Victorian travel writer.

As we move through then we're going to think about what she does throughout the response in terms of her attitude.

We're going to particularly note any points where her perspective changes and what is that she's looking at to make that perspective change.

And then we're also going to look at the points where an attitude is reinforced.

Okay so you've got your sentence starters again.

Finally, you're going to have a look at her feelings towards her situation and think about the typical or atypical.

It takes a really nice angle to take one would expect however, Bird subverts the expectations because so think about typical and atypical to add an extra dimension to your perspective writing.

At the end we give a final overview.

Overall Bird's viewpoint is influenced by the fact what's that crucial influence at the heart of the perspective that she adopts.

So what I'm going to do is to give you control of the screen.

What you need to do, is to get down the introductory paragraph that I've given you and complete it.

And then just get these sentence starters down, jot down any initial reactions, and you will have the opportunity in a moment to really nail your thinking by rereading the extract.

Okay, let's get ourselves ready.

So that's the question, write it down, get all the sentences down, when you're ready we'll have a look at the extract.

Off to you.

And welcome back.

So final step for today, you are now going to have the opportunity to reread the extract, select three to five quotations, to support your response and use the writing frame, to complete your refined answer.

Take your time.

You are ready.

Make sure that you are thinking about all of the elements of the lesson.

Make use of the descriptive detail to describe Birds character, all those adjectives that we generated at the beginning.

Make sure that you take the most important points about context and make those points within your response.

Control is now over to you.

Take your time, make it perfect off you go And welcome back.

So you have your completed response to Isabella Birds perspectives.

I'm going to ask you to bring that along with you to our next session, and also the work that you've previously done on The following sessions are going to look at how we start to think about these two travel writers together.

All that remains for me to say today is thank you for your focus.

Don't forget to do your exit quiz and enjoy the rest of your learning today.