From Word To Word

I have decided to approach my Survey of English Literature II course a little differently this fall.  It will be my fourth time teaching the course, and I have already experimented with it quite heavily the past two times I have taught it, but I have never been satisfied with the degree to which it, or any of my other courses, encouraged students to learn and read and write independently.  I always felt that I was perpetuating the very kinds of educational dynamics that I find so abhorrent.

A short while ago, however, Dave Humphrey posted on modes of lecturing or, perhaps, if you will pardon the neologism, on modes of unlecturing.  He was responding to another post by Kuis von Ahn, and I will not go into the details of the discussion, but I was particularly struck by something he wrote: “Let your own students produce the things they actually want. Let them build examples needed to teach these concepts. Let them critique and collaborate on the work, improving it iteratively. And let this process of collaborative learning and teaching become what happens in the classroom.”

What Dave is describing here is far more than collaborative teaching or experiential learning or any of the other classroom techniques that come in and out of fashion.  It is an approach that puts the onus for learning entirely on the students.  The students are responsible for determining what it is that they need to learn, for how it is that they would learn this best, for how their learning might best be supplemented, and for how this learning should be shared with their peers.  The teacher, far from abdicating the role of teacher, is then forced to teach truly, to enable, facilitate, encourage, model, and provoke the process of learning that the student has chosen.

Dave and I have discussed these ideas before, and we had a chance to discuss them again shortly after he posted. During this conversation, he made several suggestions, and I suddenly realized what it was that I wanted to do with the course this year.  Let me explain.  Then you can all tell me exactly how and why it will cost me my career.

The first day of class will be much the same as any other:  introductions, administrative details, etcetera.  The second class, however, will be held at a local used bookstore, where the students will be asked to buy five books from the time period covered by the course.  These books can be of any length and of any genre and of any variety.  They need meet only a single criterion, one unilaterally enforced by myself: No crap.

The students will then be responsible to read the books, think about them, reflect on them, and then post responses to them on a group blog that I will create for the class.  They will also be asked to comment on each other’s posts.  There will be no assigned format for these posts, but they will have the same criterion as the texts: No crap.

The classes, which may or may not be held in the classroom on any given day, will be primarily constituted by discussion.  The subject of this discussion will begin with the texts that the students are reading and with the posts that they have been writing, but it need need be restricted to these things.  Like any useful discussion, it will probably range in far different directions, though I will try to keep it circulating around questions of literature as much as possible.

I will also participate in this whole process.  I will buy five books, read them, and post on them.  I will comment on other posts.  I will participate in the class discussion.  Though my participation will necessarily be different at times, because of a differential in knowledge and experience of the subject that we will be discussing, and also because my goals will consciously include those of the teacher, I hope to encourage a discussion that permits each student to take the initiative in respect to the books that he or she has chosen, rather than relying on me for direction.

My goal is simple.  It is not to train literary scholars or literary critics.  It is not to produce academics.  If it were, my approach would be worse than useless.  My goal is to provoke my students into reading, into thinking, into writing, into sharing, into conversing.  It want to model for them an approach to literature that is based on passion and desire.  I want them to encounter something, even if it is only one thing, something that they love, something that will cause them to keep picking up the books around them in the hope of finding something else that they will love.

I want to stop teaching literature.  I want to start teaching reading.