Believing that fellow teachers are our most underutilized resource, we love using this space to feature what teachers are doing in their classrooms. Elizabeth Chapman is an English teacher and Department Chair at Bellaire High School in Houston, TX and has generously shared her Dracula unit. Her unit can be used in a couple of ways: specifically how Dracula lays out in the day to day or how the pacing and arc of the unit can be applied to other novels. Either way, this thorough unit will in spire you. Thank you, Elizabeth! – S and B
One afternoon a quarter of a century ago, I was a ninth grade student waiting on the steps outside of my school for my mom to pick me up. “What are you reading?” asked a boy from my class, and I showed him the book: Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
“You’re just reading that for fun?” he asked, suspicious. “Maybe you’ll grow up to be an English teacher.”
“Absolutely not,” I said.
And yet here we are.
For English teachers like me, I think that our seasons often come to us in the form of a return to the texts we teach across each cycle of the year. Just as I look forward to the first crisp days of fall, the twinkling lights of winter, and the lengthening daylight of spring, I always feel a sense of excitement when it’s time to share Dracula with my latest cohort of kids.
Here are some of the reasons why I think that text has worked so well in my classroom.
The themes and questions of the novel are eternally relevant.
I feel some anxiety about the state of the world that we are passing along to our young people, but teaching about monsters-as-metaphors helps me to think that I’m giving them some tools to at least make sense of it. We all encounter vampires, and the study of what makes a character compelling and powerful enough to get away with exploitive behavior gives my students tools to read the people and situations in their lives. The conversation about Robert Eggers Nosferatu (2024) proves that the issues inherent in vampire stories are still very much a part of our culture.
The mystery and drama of the plot motivates my students to grapple with the pre-twentieth-century syntax and diction.
Getting students to read book-length works – especially with some outside-of-class reading – can be a challenge. Even contemporary works that have accessible language and clear connections to my students’ worlds can sometimes be a hard sell, so persisting through the hard work of unpacking texts from more than a century ago is a stretch for many of my kids.
But the juicy storyline of Dracula pulls my kids through the difficult language; many tell me it’s their favorite book of the year. The book is divided into 27 short chapters (many around 10 pages or fewer, and many ending on cliffhangers), so reading a section each night is manageable and helps them to build up the routine and stamina they will need for longer texts in the future.
The text offers opportunities to practice lots of different skills and learn about important literary concepts.
I cannot think of any other book that gives me the chance to cover so much material; my students get a chance to learn about epistolary texts, Gothic conventions, Victorian literature, the horror genre, and literary criticism, and there are ample opportunities to make connections to mythology, poetry, nonfiction, and other forms of media. In the unit that I’ve built, every objective from the AP Literature curriculum is covered at least once, in addition to many of the essential knowledge statements from the Conceptual Framework.
I hope that other teachers might both consider including this text in their curriculum and check out the materials I’ve made. Vampire stories, like Dracula himself, have persisted across the centuries, and once you’ve had a taste of the book, I bet it will leave you wanting more.
