Refugee: Author's Craft, Themes & Evidence — How Setting Drives Conflict

Refugee: Author's Craft, Themes & Evidence — How Setting Drives Conflict
Setting Impact Investigation | Grades 6–8

What if the setting of a story doesn't just provide the background—but actually creates the conflict?
In this engaging, no-prep lesson, students investigate how Alan Gratz uses setting to create and shape the central conflicts experienced by Josef, Isabel, and Mahmoud in Refugee. Through collaborative research, close reading, and textual analysis, students examine how historical events, geographical conditions, political circumstances, and social environments directly influence the challenges each character faces.

Students apply their findings through a Setting Impact Investigation, exploring how the specific time and place of each storyline creates obstacles, limits choices, and drives the plot forward. As an added challenge, students reimagine one storyline in a completely different setting and explain how changing the circumstances would transform the central conflict.

What's Included
- Teacher Directions with lesson flow, differentiation, and assessment ideas
- Student Overview introducing setting as a conflict-generating literary element
- Mini Research Questions to build background understanding
- Five-Step Group Activity guiding students through the Setting Impact Investigation
- Three Student Worksheets focused on setting research, textual evidence, cause-and-effect analysis, comparisons, and deeper interpretation
- Color and Black-and-White Versions of all three student worksheets

Students Will
- Identify significant geographical, historical, political, and social elements of setting
- Investigate how setting creates or intensifies conflict across all three storylines
- Collect and analyze specific textual evidence from the novel
- Explain how setting influences characters' decisions, actions, and available choices
- Trace cause-and-effect relationships between setting details, conflicts, and character responses
- Compare how different historical settings create different challenges
- Examine how setting influences the development of the plot
- Reimagine a storyline in a different location, time period, or political environment
- Predict how changing the setting would alter the central conflict
- Develop and present evidence-based conclusions about setting as an essential literary element

Why Teachers Love It
- No Prep Required: Ready-to-use teacher directions and structured student activities
- Flexible Timing: Designed for 1–2 class periods of 45–60 minutes each
- Meaningful Literary Analysis: Moves students beyond identifying setting to explaining its influence on conflict and plot
- Collaborative Learning: Encourages research, discussion, and evidence-based reasoning
- Critical Thinking: Challenges students to investigate cause-and-effect relationships and consider alternative circumstances
- Historical Connections: Integrates geographical, political, and historical context into literary analysis
- Textual Evidence Focus: Strengthens students' ability to support interpretations with specific details from the novel
- Creative Application: The Setting Twist encourages students to apply their understanding in a new situation
- Built-In Differentiation: Supports a range of reading levels and learning needs
- Print-Friendly: Includes color and black-and-white student worksheets

Perfect For
- Refugee by Alan Gratz novel studies
- Setting and conflict analysis
- Cause-and-effect analysis
- Close reading and textual evidence practice
- Character motivation and decision-making discussions
- Comparing historical and geographical settings
- Collaborative literary investigations

This resource is an independent educational supplement and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Alan Gratz or the novel's publisher. A copy of the novel is required.