As the fall is upon us and most universities and colleges have just started classes, I thought it appropriate to consider something central to the planning of a literature course: choosing what texts to read in a class.
Of course, there are many reasons that we might decide to have our class read a certain text: the text meets departmental requirements, it’s important to a particular field of study, it’s a part of a traditional canon or it’s distinctly outside of a traditional cannon, it’s trendy (though would we admit that?), it’s a personal favorite, or it reinforces one of the goals of the class. But these reasons, no matter how important, only indirectly consider the primary members of the class: the students.
So, the question is: how much influence do/should the students of a class have on text selection?
During the recent barrage of posts appearing on my social media feeds these past few weeks relating to crafting new syllabi for the upcoming academic year, one particular message really stood out and spoke to this question. The message was sent out by Donna Campbell, a professor of American literature at Washington State University; in it Campbell wrote that after seeing that her class was composed of a variety of students from all academic levels and majors, she decided to cancel a particular Henry James text.
I was curious about her decision to nix the text from her syllabus just days before class, based on preliminary information about her students, so I asked Dr. Campbell about her choice. Her reply? A striking example of student-centric pedagogy. She said, “I substituted another text because it seemed to me that with students at so many levels of preparation, beginning with an author as complex as James might tend to discourage some of them. We’d usually have some time to build up to James, but in this particular course he would have been nearly the first author they encountered, and I wanted them to have a more positive experience.”
To be clear, Campbell did not base her text selection on whether or not her class would “like” the book. Instead, she based her selection on the perceived needs of her students and on the idea that a chosen text should encourage student success in the classroom. Some might argue that if a text is central to a theme or time period it should not be discarded because of its difficulty; others might that claim the English classroom should, above all, be rigorous and not too heavily influenced by how students are perceived to be able to handle a text. But there is something absolutely generous and refreshing about Campbell’s decision. Her decision reminds us that despite the fact that choosing a text is a simple task made difficult by the countless parties and politics involved, it is also a task that can and should be influenced by an understanding of the needs of our students.
Campbell, like countless other literature professors and teachers, provides us with a good example of how to head into a semester with a student-centric view of the classroom, a view that when enacted can truly encourage, foster, and develop student success alongside student learning and intellectual engagement.
Inevitably, in choosing a text we should carefully consider the needs of our departments and institutions, the trends of our fields, and the thematic requisites of our courses; but we should also consider our students. And we should remember that though students come to our classrooms from different degree programs, with different skills, and by way of different routes, they all should leave our classrooms with a more complex and contextualized view of the world. The success of this goal certainly does not end with text selection, but it does begin with it.