What Is Dystopia? How to Introduce Students to the Genre
“Miss, what is dystopia?”
Isn’t this how every unit goes? You introduce a term, use it frequently, and yet . . . five weeks in, students are still asking “what is dystopia?”
One of our favorite things to talk to other teachers about is their reading lists. What are they reading? What are they assigning their students to read? What should we read?
As we’ve done this, we’ve realized that many of you are probably hearing this “what is dystopia” question frequently in your classroom because everyone, it seems, is reading dystopian literature. And it makes sense: students may not know what dystopia is, but they do know they like it.
Dystopian literature units are common—The Handmaid’s Tale, Brave New World, 1984, Animal Farm, The Marrow Thieves. And, of course, The Hunger Games, which we’ve been immersed in for the last few months as we develop our own dystopian unit (spoiler alert: it’s going to be good!).
The longer we spend deep-diving into dystopian literature, the more we realize why it’s so common in classrooms. We knew it was engaging and often action-packed, but as English teachers, we love to talk about themes and the ways in which literature comments on the larger world we live in. Dystopian literature offers us ample opportunities to do this in ways that are highly accessible to students. Sure, they may struggle to see the value in knowing the ins-and-outs of Regency-era marriage customs, but power-hungry dictators who demand conformity and repress freedom of speech? Our students have something to say about that.
There are times when we can dive right into a piece of literature, letting our students figure things out as they go. But there are also times when we need to start with the basics. Teaching dystopian literature is one of those times: “What is dystopia?” is a question all of our students need to be able to answer to fully understand (and appreciate) these texts.
This is why it’s essential to start any dystopian literature unit with a review of the genre.
But what do we cover? There’s so much we could do, and there are many great units out there that would allow us to spend weeks exploring the characteristics of the genre.
Sometimes, however, efficiency matters most. We wanted to create an introductory lesson that answers that “what is dystopia” question quickly, while still engaging students and saving our time for the novel itself.
If you, like us, are looking for an easy way to cover the basics, we’ve got you covered.
Getting Students Thinking
It’s essential for students to understand that a dystopia usually results from a utopia gone wrong. Someone gets an idea about how to make the world a better place and sets out to implement it. But since we don’t all agree on what the ideal world looks like, getting everyone on board requires someone to take charge and “enforce” a set of guidelines. And once someone starts forcing others to adhere to a way of thinking, things tip all too easily into a world that is far from ideal.
To prepare students to understand this idea, we start with a quick write, asking them to describe what they think an ideal world looks like.
Then, we show them Alex Gendler’s TedED video, “How to Recognize a Dystopia,” which introduces the terms “utopia” and “dystopia” and starts to describe how the efforts to achieve one often lead to the other.
At the end of the video, the narrator asks viewers to think of the world they pictured as ideal and imagine what they would have to do to get others to go along with those ideas. So, referring back to their initial quick write, students take a few minutes to do that in a new quick write.
Finally, we ask them to consider why it might so often be the case that attempts to create a “perfect” world often lead to dystopia. This is often the hardest part for students; sure, they can provide the obvious answers, but they’re likely not thinking about the nuances . . . yet. (That’s what your amazing novel will likely get students thinking about.)
Looking at an Example
Before we dive into the characteristics of a dystopia, we want students to have a common reference point that we can reference for examples of each characteristic. While, as high school teachers, we use The Hunger Games as our example before assigning a text like The Handmaid’s Tale or 1984, if the majority of your students have not yet read The Hunger Games (or seen the movie) that doesn’t work.
If you’ve been with us for a while, you know that for many of our introductory activities, we like to use short films and television shows whenever possible, but our go-to list of Pixar shorts was, no surprise here, not as helpful as usual for this particular topic.
After a quick Google of dystopian short stories, we settled on Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” from his 1968 short story collection Welcome to the Monkey House. The story clearly exemplifies the characteristics of a dystopia we need, it shows up frequently on middle school reading lists, and (crucial for an introductory activity), it is short.
Since we only want to make sure our students have a common reference point, we don’t teach “Harrison Bergeron” like we might another short story; instead, we play the audio for students and have them reflect with a quick 3-2-1 response about things they would like about living in the society depicted in “Harrison Bergeron,” things they would not like about living in the society, and something that reminds them of the world they live in. Students share their response with a partner, and then we ask volunteers to share with the rest of the class, taking time to focus on the “why” behind their responses.
What is Dystopia? The 9 Characteristics of a Dystopia
Once students begin to think about the underlying ideas and we all have a common reference point in “Harrison Bergeron,” we go through nine characteristics of a dystopia with students, defining key concepts and providing examples from “Harrison Bergeron” to illustrate each point.
- Authoritarian Leader
- Conformity
- Illusion of Utopia
- Restriction and Censorship
- Propaganda
- Surveillance
- Fear of Those Outside One’s Community
- Dehumanization
- Role of Natural World Minimized
When we created our lesson, we developed several options for handouts to give students to accompany the presentation: our preferred choice is fill-in-the-blank notes to hold students accountable for paying attention without slowing down the activity waiting for them to write down every word. But we also created a version that just has the content from the presentation (for students who would struggle to take notes) and a version with only the quick write activities (for those times when students are required to take their own notes or if the teacher presentation will be posted on an LMS).
We end the presentation by asking students to complete one last quick write, identifying which of the nine characteristics of a dystopia they could see occurring as a consequence of the “ideal” world they created at the beginning of the activity.
Reinforcing the Learning
As one last activity before diving into our novel unit, we created a pixel puzzle review activity for students to complete. They answer 12 questions based on the presentation, and for each right answer, they reveal a new piece of an image.
We also created a paper version of the activity (fun, but not as fun without the picture reveal) for teachers to be able to use the activity as a quiz or for those students without access to technology.
This was a quick and easy introductory lesson that got us all on the same page before beginning our novel unit, and it would work well with any dystopia unit (even if you want students to do literature circles and read the dystopian novel of their choice). Anything that heads off those relentless “what is dystopia” questions is a win in our book!
Save yourself time and deliver this lesson today with our easy-to-follow, everything-included Characteristics of a Dystopia lesson plan. It comes with the materials to complete all of the activities described here (with all their variations) as well as a detailed lesson overview with suggestions for implementation. We hope you’ll let us know how it goes by emailing us at [email protected] or connecting with us on Instagram @threeheads.works.