By Camila Gamboa and Jason Parris, Highschool English Teachers

As a culminating project for our shared study of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, the students in the Novels class created remixes. They took elements of Kafka’s novella and combined them with elements of other works–and other genres–synthesizing all of these into something that was at once inspired by the spirit of the novel and recontextualized in a way that brought something fresh to our shared understanding. The basis of their remix was not only the Metamorphosis text itself, but also the analysis they had previously done in the form of a close reading where students looked closely at specific passages–of their own choosing–in the novella and tied their analysis to the themes we explored as a class.

Finally, they wrote an artist statement that explained the thinking/process that went into their remix addressing how the choices they made are connected to the essential questions we explored together: