The Elephant Man Project

Earlier today my group gave its presentation for The Elephant Man (play not movie) in our popular culture class. It took us a while to actually figure out what we were going to do for the presentation, especially because our group was so large. We eventually settled on doing a Who Wants to be a Millionaire style game with a group discussion at the end.

Before we decided on that specific presentation, we thought a lot about the ideas, themes and symbols within the text. I did a lot of research into the advent of popularity of freak shows in Victorian England, the reasons for its popularity, and how it can relate to the current culture of our society. I thought about the movie Freaks and some of the famous freaks of yesteryear like Violet and Daisy Hilton, Frank Lentini, and Schlitzie the Pinhead to name a few.  I looked into various current pop culture 'freaks' that we are incredibly fascinated with and the ways in which they are similar to the original side show freaks and if they serve the same functions, and what those functions were.

After one group meeting (I was not able to attend because I was at work) it was realized that we were thinking about our presentation in terms of a lot of lecturing which was not the point of this project, so we needed to re-plan and come up with something to get more classroom involvement. After emailing back and forth a couple of us had a meeting where it was decided that we would present a  'Who Wants to be an Elephant Man' game. We each came up with five questions of varying difficulty, which unfortunately were not difficult enough. From that point we had, and I attended, two more meetings to divvy up the duties for the actual presentation. During one of the meetings I helped to shape the final question in order to allow for other group members work to be tied in to our new presentation in a meaningful way. During the actual presentation I was one of the people that asked questions during the game and led some of the discussion afterwards with the class.

I feel like because our group was so large, it was difficult to meet with everybody because of so many conflicting schedules, but ultimately we came out with a good product. Everybody was responsible for creating questions and saying at least a blurb during the actual presentation. Overall I feel like we incorporated all of our members and tried to create something that was not an entire waste of time for the students.