The concept for this lesson is to help students analyze what defines a community and how to recognize its values and traditions. They will recognize the relationship between an individual’s values and the shared values within their community.

This will provide a framework for the concept of community as students begin reading Things Fall Apart so they can make connections with the themes within the novel and analyze the conflict which arises between the main character’s value system and his community’s value structure.

Students should be able to be able to identify the elements of community and analyze the universal qualities of those elements to see how their own community is not so different from Igbo culture in the novel.