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Abena Antwih, Jamie Hain, and Harry Gatanis Dr. Crovitz ENGL 7741 27 June 2011 Take an apple for your trouble… Enter hence then, on the double!


 * A //Twilight// Project's Apology for Teachers**

While Meyer’s adolescent romance series—as both verbal and visual texts—may possess an identity which favors popular value over literary virtue, the novels’ mass-market, teenage appeal may provide members of the secondary-education community an opportunity to engage their students’ hobbies with their lessons’ subject matter. For as the Metiri Group—a division of the Cisco company—asserts in their study “Multimodal Learning through Media: What the Research Says,” “Experienced teachers [must] recognize that the design of lessons must adapt to the expertise and prior knowledge of the learner, the complexity of the content, and interests of the learner” (“Multimodal Learning” 8). Thus, the //Twilight Saga//—bereft of canonical English merit, yet imbued with considerable pre- and post-pubescent-girl readership—may inspire an especial sense of critical dialogue and animation in the middle- and high-school English classroom, challenging the class-body to deconstruct, and therein further appreciate, a text which they cherish, rather than despise (or cannot access). Concordantly, these novels’ particular, indeed almost iconic, visual composition encourages young students to ponder the mysteries and systems of image-argument from an experiential position of comfort and expertise. If Nancy Allen’s observation that “Teaching visual rhetoric […] isn’t so much teaching a new set of skills as reawakening our visual skills and developing our ways of seeing” (Allen 34) proves applicable to the classroom, perhaps allowing learners to question a visual text’s meanings, themes, and semantics through simple, readily-recognizable imagery and framing (i.e. //Twilight//’s sparse representation of a red apple cradled in white hands before a black backdrop) would produce a complexity of analytical response born only from reader interest and engagement. Must learners not walk before they can run? Must viewers not recognize, before they can understand?