Lesson 30: Seen and Unseen, Part 14

Display the Essential Question: How can readers evaluate words and images for accuracy, perspective, and ethical use? Students will use the Turn-and-Talk routine to answer the question below. Collect and list examples from the class, identifying common effects of sequencing such as the creation of suspense, surprise, empathy, and clarity.

Turn and Talk

Say these Directions: Take a moment to think about the prompt, then Use a Turn and Talk routine to discuss your answer with a partner:

• Ask: When you read or watch a story, how does the order of events or images affect how you feel or what you understand? Use examples to explain your thinking.

  • When I watch horror movies, I often feel suspense because of the imagery that leads up to the big scare or reveal. By delaying that moment and having the camera go down a dark hallway, for example, the director builds suspense.

  • Some books and movies, including a lot of mystery or detective fiction, reveal key details of the ending right at the beginning. Then, the reader or viewer follows the story to see how it arrives at that ending. This can create a sense of curiosity and intrigue. Gradually, the path of the story becomes clearer, and it is easier to see how it will connect back to what the audience already knows.

Point out that, broadly speaking, the structure and sequence of a story can either confirm or challenge our expectations for what will happen.

• Say: When images and events appear in an expected sequence, readers and viewers often feel a sense of clarity and familiarity. Narratives that are meant mainly to convey information typically follow this pattern.

• Say: When they appear in an unexpected order, it can surprise readers and viewers and often elicit stronger emotions. Audiences may feel more empathy for people or characters who are caught up in an unexpected misfortune.

Connection to Today’s Learning

• Say: In Seen and Unseen, the authors carefully chose the order of survivor testimony, photos, and illustrations. Today, we will look at how the sequence itself carries meaning.

Display the target words. Students will use the Word Relationship routine to explore the relationship between the target words. After students have had time to discuss, invite volunteers to share their answers with the larger group.

Word Relationship

Say these Directions: Take a moment to think about how the target words connect with one another. Then, discuss your ideas with a partner.

Target words: sequence, structure

• Ask: How are sequence and structure related to each other?

  • A sequence is when images, events, or objects follow a specific order. A structure is any kind of way that the parts of something fit together.

After students share, prompt students’ connecting across words. 

• Ask: Is a sequence a kind of structure? Why or why not?

  • Yes, a sequence is a kind of structure because the images, events, or objects are parts of something larger, arranged in a specific way. Sometimes, we even use the two words interchangeably: for example, when we say that a story has a beginning–middle–end structure, we are describing the sequence of events.

• Ask: What is an example of a structure that is not a sequence?

  • A bookshelf has a structure, with a frame on the top, bottom, and sides and shelves in between, but we wouldn’t call that structure a sequence. The frame and rooms of a house are a structure that is not a sequence. However, we could walk through the different rooms in a particular sequence.

• Ask: Other than events in a story or images in a text, what are some examples of things that follow a sequence?

  • Digits in a phone number follow a sequence because they have a particular order—if you put the digits in a different order, you get a different sequence. Steps in a recipe or set of instructions also follow a sequence.

Connection to Today’s Learning

• Say: In this lesson, we will look at the sequence of images and events in Seen and Unseen as part of a larger effort to understand the book’s structure. We will focus on how images and events follow each other within the timeline of the story, as well as how they follow one another across pages of the book.

Project or display a three- or four-page sequence of your choice from Seen and Unseen. Use the Think-Aloud routine as you model how to identify and annotate. Pause to talk through your annotations. In Part B, consider assigning a four-page sequence if two of the pages present a single large photo or illustration, as they do on pp. 40–41 or pp. 70–71. See the Teacher Tip for additional suggestions. Provide students with sticky notes and/or highlighters.

Part A: Model Annotating for Sequence (RI.7.5, RI.7.6) (10 minutes)

Say these Directions: Annotations are notes that you take while reading. When annotating for sequence, consider the following:

• Shifts in mood or pacing from page-to-page

  • This page uses long sentences and a quiet photo; the next uses fragmented text and a tighter visual frame.

• Escalation or contrast

  • The images move from wide shots to close-up faces—that changes how personal it feels.

• Movement from seen to unseen

  • First we see a public moment; next we hear a private fear.

In each case, comment on both the sequential elements that are evident in the text and their likely effect on the reader’s experience or understanding.

When interpreting a text, you should also consider other structural choices, such as:

• Ask: How does the placement of survivor testimony relative to other materials: Is it front and center or off to the side? Does it “fight” for attention with visual media on the same page?

• Ask: How do illustrations interact with text: Do the illustrations visually repeat what the text is saying, extend it with details not mentioned in the text, or introduce new ideas?

• Ask: What is omitted between pages? Not every moment of the story is narrated in words or shown in images; what aspects of the story get abbreviated or skipped over?

• Say: Look for the author's intentional page-to-page choices. These choices shape how readers interpret survivor testimony.

Part B: Annotate for Sequence (RI.7.5, RI.7.6, SL.7.1) (20 minutes)

Turn and Talk

Say these Directions: Now, you will work in pairs to analyze a different page sequence. Use sticky notes to annotate and record your thinking. Then, use the Turn and Talk routine to answer the following questions:

• What changes from page to page? (tone, image, focus, pacing)

• What does the placement of testimony after a certain photo make you think or feel?

• What surprises you about what is included—or missing—between pages?

• How does the sequence move from surface observation to deeper understanding?

• How does the order help you responsibly evaluate these historical events?

When students are finished, reconvene the class and lead a whole-group discussion. The SAMPLE RESPONSES below reflect pp. 28–31 from Seen and Unseen.

• Ask: What structural decision stood out most?

  • What stood out most to me was the decision to show many small illustrations of people with their luggage rather than just one representative individual. This helped me appreciate that people of all ages and from all walks of life were caught up in the forced relocation and incarceration.

• Ask: How did the sequence affect how you understood the survivors’ experience?

  • The sequence showed a night journey in a bus with closed windows followed by the small illustrations of people arriving at Tanforan. Showing the bus with Amy Iwasaki’s testimony reminded me how Japanese Americans were being treated as “all the same,” and the illustrations on the next page underscored that this treatment was unfair and inaccurate.

• Ask: What remained unseen or unspoken, and how did the structure highlight that?

  • What was unseen here was the landscape that people traveled through to get to Tanforan. It was unseen by the passengers themselves because of the papered-over and shuttered windows. The people on the buses and trains were unseen too by anyone who might have noticed them pass by. The structure highlighted this by presenting a bus with a lone face peeking out of it, followed by a sort of group portrait of all the people who might have been inside.

• Ask: What structural patterns do you notice across different sequences?

  • I notice that the book often uses a two-page spread with a single large image for “big” moments, such as the forced removal of Japanese Americans to Tanforan and the violence that followed the winter protests at Manzanar.

• Ask: How do structure, sequence, and pacing shape emotion?

  • The structure, sequence, and pacing of Seen and Unseen combine to provoke strong emotions and then give us some space to process them. Instead of presenting us with one horrible episode after another, the author and illustrator intersperse the worst aspects of the story—children taken from school and bused off to the desert, prisoners shot down by guards—with stories of survival and resilience. So we feel a lot of empathy for the prisoners, but we also have a chance to reflect on their situation in detail and see how strong many of them were.

• Ask: How does the arrangement of testimony help us understand what daily life felt like in the camps?

  • By arranging testimony in roughly chronological order, we can get a sense for how life in the camps improved in some ways for some people even as it worsened for others. For instance, following the story of Toyo Miyatake, we get to see how he eventually gained official recognition and was able to help people commemorate special occasions even while imprisoned. However, we also learn that the “no-nos” were sent to a higher-security facility that is indicated with a single ominous illustration.

• Ask: What responsibilities do we have when interpreting testimony that is intentionally structured?

  • We have a responsibility to think about what is being presented and what is being left out—and why. We also need to think about what effect the authors are trying to create and whether we think the response they are going for is a fair one. For instance, Partridge and Tamaki want us to understand the Japanese Americans as survivors of seriously unfair treatment, and as we look at other sources, it is easy to agree with this point of view. However, some government or news sources from the time instead use both their structure and content to suggest that the incarceration policy was humane and orderly. We would want to think critically when encountering such a perspective.

Have students write a short response to the prompt. Collect the response as formative data.

Quick Write

Say these Directions: Write two to three sentences in response to the following question:

• Identify one structural choice in your page sequence (a shift, placement, order, or omission) and explain how it shaped your understanding of the survivor’s experience.

  • On p. 49, a large portrait photograph of Torazo Sakawye appears right after Dorothea Lange’s question “How could we?” and right before a statement that Sakawye died in the internment camp. The photo made me feel pity for Sakawye and others who didn’t experience freedom again. It also made me understand more deeply the meaning of Lange’s question.