Group Responsibilities:
Each member of your group should volunteer to assume one of the following roles. These roles will be assigned for the first meeting, but from that point on, you should decide who will do what role for the next small group discussion at the end of each session. You should rotate roles so that each member has an opportunity to do something different each time.

Investigator: Your job is to interpret some background information on any topic that is related to the section of the text under consideration. Before class you should read through this information and draw parallels between the text and this additional material. Be prepared to report to the group and the class as a whole about your findings. Background information might include: A) the weather, geography, culture, or history of the text's setting B) information about the author, her life, and other works she has written, C) pictures, objects or materials that illustrate elements in the text, D) music that reflects the text or the time. For links to many Internet sites appropriate to this text, see the "Historical Context" and/or "Author" headings on our class's Beloved web site.

Text Discussion Director: Your job is to develop a list of questions your group would like us all to discuss about this part of the text. Don't worry about the very small detail (unless it seems of unusual importance for some reason); your task is to help your group talk over the big ideas in the reading in order to share their reactions and interpretations. You will be asked to generate a list of five questions, and to record your group's tentative answers to the questions.

Literary Luminary: Your job is to locate a few special sections of the text that our class needs to hear read aloud. The idea is to help the class remember some interesting, powerful, funny, puzzling, or important sections of the text. You will decide which passages or paragraphs are worth hearing aloud, and read them aloud to your group. You will have to choose at least two passages, and be prepared to explain why these passages were selected. (What do they reveal about character, theme, setting, etc.? How might the passage be interpreted from different critical perspectives?) The "Literary Devices" and "Literary Theories" headings on our class's Beloved web site may help you with terms or stances you are considering.

Summarizer: Your job is to use the group's individual reader responses to create a composite summary of the events in this section of the text. You will have to be a discriminating reader, as you choose which ideas seem to have greater significance than others. You may be asked to read this aloud for the whole class.