Tolkien once said in his lecture "On Fairy Stories" that fantasy began with a shift in perspective, saying, "The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water." The change in perspective, creates the mythical world and also provides us with new ways to view our own.
How to start? A good hook for beginning a change in perspective can be found in lots of ways on YouTube. Here, thanks to my children, are some of my favorites. The first is one that has gained a lot of popularity: "Marcel the Shell with Shoes On":
Students can look at how Marcel lives in our world and uses the objects we use but in different ways. It's a great way to start looking at the world around us in a new perspective. I certainly don't look at lentils or Doritos the same. You can segue Marcel into real life by looking at some of the fabulous photographs of Vyacheslav Mischenko and his documentation of tiny snails moving through our world at this Distractify site.
If shells and nature don't fit in as well into your learning experiences, we can look at the human experience through either of these series. The first series is "Convos with My 2 Year Old", and here is the first episode:
By taking conversations with his daughter and giving those pieces of dialogue to a grown man, the conversation changes entirely. Why is it creepy? What makes that one change such a significant change? How does this perspective on the words change when a new speaker recites them? To continue with the child perspective, excerpts from Jason Kotecki's The Escape Adulthood Manifesto (personally, I would skip the religious part).
Children have a natural curiosity and imagination that this video and others in the series show with this altered perspective. This can move into a great exploration of what our students are curious about. Here is a great post from te@chthought about the stages of curiosity, the characteristics of those stages, and how how stages process and the role of the educator.
Regaining the childlike perspective and celebration of the everyday can lead to great discussions and products. Here is a TED talk from poet Billy Collins about just that:
In this talk, Collins reads some of his poems that celebrate the everyday and discusses how those poems changed perspective some when turning them into animated films. Transfer of a genre is a great way to encourage a new perspective and shows a high level of synthesis! Students can remake things in a new perspective - whether the things are their own or someone else's. Students can also respond in a different genre than typically expected. After reading nonfiction, how about taking those annotations and building a haiku?
If you want to just remain with the childlike perspective, here is Collins reading "The Lanyard," which is in the voice of an adult considering a childhood gift from this new perspective:
To continue in the vein of creepy changes in perspective, Buzzfeed has a playlist of creepy videos also all about perspective. Here is the one called "Things Cats Do That'd Be Creepy if an Adult Did Them":
This piece resembles the video above with the notion of changing the agent of the action. By turning the agent into a human instead of a cat, the actions look creepy and out of place. Yet, we have no problem with expecting cats to do cat-like things. What other actions of people and animals do we accept because we expect this to be so? How does turning this on its ear help us reevaluate the action in the new and original contexts?
To move this into more depth, here is Billy Collins again, this time with his poems from the voice of dogs:
Collins discusses how he writes these poems in this excerpt as well. In the second poem, "The Revenant," the dog reveals that the human's perspective of their relationship was completely wrong. This gets into assumptions. What assumptions do we make about others? about animals? about how we see the world? Where do those assumptions come from, and why do we accept them? What happens when those assumptions are challenged or proved untrue?
Once the hook is there, perspective can be gathered and investigated in other ways. Sites like ProCon.org provides multiple perspectives surrounding current issues of the day. Students can debate perspectives and provide reasoning for their perspective on sites such as Tricider.
So What?
In all cases, the simple change of perspective provides a variety of meaningful ways to enter into a topic, explore new ideas, challenge assumptions, and grow in our thinking. Encouraging a new perspective also reaches into the 21st Century Skills involving Critical Thinking and Problem Solving as well as Creativity and Innovation.
