One lens per lesson, then synthesis and exam application.
Intended learning: identify what a text treats as 'common sense' and interrogate it.
Teaching: Barthes' myth: ideology succeeds when invisible. Take a familiar advertisement or fairy tale; list every assumption it requires you to accept without noticing.
The ad's grammar does the ideology: the product is Agent in every active clause ("it protects", "it delivers") while the family appears only as Goal — cared for, never caring. Protection becomes something purchased rather than performed, an assumption the viewer accepts because no sentence ever asks them to think it.
'Common sense audit': list five assumptions of one text you love; star the one most worth challenging.
Intended learning: trace how economic relations shape character fate and language.
In Gatsby's world, accent is destiny: Tom's "I've been everywhere and seen everything" drawl performs inherited certainty, while Gatsby's studied "old sport" betrays a man rehearsing membership he can never hold. Fitzgerald puts class not in bank balances but in phonetics.
Wealth map of your text: who has money, how did they get it, what speech rights follow?
Intended learning: explain consent-manufacturing through Gramsci's hegemony using textual evidence.
Find one moment where a character defends 'the system' against their own interest; annotate the language of that defence.
Intended learning: analyse gender construction via speech, agency and gaze.
One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)
Speech-time audit of one scene: count lines by gender; note interruptions and topic control.
Intended learning: read representation, language privilege and resistance through Said/Fanon/Spivak.
Two-column chart: characters with narrated interiority vs those only externally described. What pattern emerges across identity lines?
Intended learning: assess whether nature is scenery, resource or kin in a text.
Transitivity again proves decisive: the river "gave" fish generously until the mill "took" — but after the dam, the river acquires verbs of refusal ("would not flood, would not feed"), grammatically promoted from resource to resistant actor at precisely the story's ecological turning point.
List every nature reference in one chapter; classify each: backdrop / resource / threat / agent.
Intended learning: locate repression and its textual returns.
Track one recurring image as symptom: each appearance = what unsaid thing resurfacing?
Intended learning: use gaps and interpretive communities analytically.
Gap inventory: list three things your text refuses to tell you; write the two readings each gap enables.
Intended learning: combine two lenses without incoherence.
Teaching: Dominant lens carries thesis; second complicates one paragraph maximum. Transition formula: "Yet this economic reading cannot account for…"
Lens-pair planner: dominant lens + complicating lens + the exact tension between them.
Intended learning: apply a chosen lens under exam conditions to an unseen-style question.
Timed essay + self-mark against criteria; keep a personal 'theory phrase bank' of five sentences that earned marks.
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