TeachRock

And just like that, Bob Dylan is born again! Even if your students are more into Timothée Chalamet’s Dylan than the original, the new film, A Complete Unknown has inspired many young people to recognize the brilliant and rebellious core of an artist their great grandparents’ age.

To my two teenagers, Dylan no longer sounds old, Folk no longer seems so soft, and lyrical messages penned 60 years ago speak directly to the world they live in today.

It is so awesome, and it is so in the spirit of TeachRock.

And in that spirit, we’re thrilled to share several fantastic Dylan-centric lesson plans we hope will get your students engaged, inspired, and thinking for themselves.

Folk Music, Rock and Roll Attitude asks students to examine the texts of songs from several genres and draw their own conclusions about the value and meaning of the categories Dylan grew to despise being placed in during A Complete Unknown. It’s a fantastic resource for both ELA and General Music classrooms.

The song “Blowin’ in the Wind” was certainly a centerpiece of A Complete Unknown, and ”Blowin’ in the Wind” as a Rallying Cry asks students to consider how the song, “uses poetic devices to communicate an open-ended yet powerful message about the human condition, without ever losing its historical specificity? The lesson also links to Modern Band Charts from our partners at Music Will–you can perform the song too!

For the ELA classroom, the pair of lessons, Dylan as Poet, and Debating Dylan’s Nobel Prize offer students the chance to contextualize Dylan within the literary worlds he loves and ultimately engage in debate regarding whether his lyricism hops the boundary between song and literature.

For students who may be curious about Pete Seeger’s brief court appearance in A Complete Unknown, Artists Protest McCarthyism uses footage of both McCarthy and Seeger to explore that dark moment in U.S. History.

The answers are indeed blowin’ in the wind, and we hope these resources will help inspire you and your students to catch them.

 

Sincerely,

Bill Carbone

Executive Director, TeachRock