Today’s guest blogger is Ben Bunting, a Ph.D. candidate in English literature at Washington State University where he teaches undergraduate courses in Composition and Literature. Bunting’s research and writing interrogates the concept of “wilderness” in 21st century America; he’s also interested in ecocriticism, game studies, and medieval literature. He plans to graduate in the spring of 2012.
After years of being one of the veritable army of literature graduate students who teach freshman composition, I was ecstatic to be given my first literature course in the spring of 2010. My excitement quickly turned to terror, though, when I realized that while I was teaching said class, I would also be preparing for my doctoral exams and beginning to draft my dissertation. I unashamedly admit that my first response to these complications was to try to design a class that minimized my day-to-day responsibilities as much as possible. However, this somewhat less-than-honorable approach actually led me to what I believe is a very effective method of teaching literature.
At the center of this approach is an assignment I call Discussion Openers, which puts small groups of students in charge of generating the class’s daily lecture and discussion content. At the beginning of the semester, I put students into groups and show them the course schedule; they then sign up for particular topics and/or readings that interest them. On a group’s assigned days, they are expected to “expand the class’s learning about an issue or issues from the readings beyond what is obvious in the text.” Rather than conceptualizing this assignment as a “presentation,” then, where the group simply shows their comprehension of the assigned readings while the rest of the class falls asleep, students are required to provide context to the readings. Some examples include:
- a group that presented on Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food by having the class participate in a blind taste-test featuring organic and non-organic oranges.
- a group that critiqued a text on the interactivity of video games by showing veterans’ reactions to World War II-themed games such as Call of Duty and Medal of Honor.
- a Scandinavian student who brought in examples of local poetry from his birth country to show thematic parallels between it and Beowulf.
After this portion of the Discussion Opener, students lead class discussion on the assigned texts and the contextual materials they’ve chosen. Usually this takes about a third of the class period; however, when groups do an exceptional job, it’s not uncommon for them to spend the entire class leading discussion from front of the room. Not only does this assignment minimize the amount of prep I need to do, it prompts students to learn more pro-actively, which goes a long way in helping them understand content and succeed in the course. Sometimes it’s difficult for them to see that the point of the Discussion Opener is not rote regurgitation, but rather an opportunity to spark a constructive, class-wide discussion. On the other side of the coin, I sometimes need to step in during a Discussion Opener to keep the conversation from going too far off track thanks to an overabundance of enthusiasm on the part of students. By and large, though, this approach to discussion in the literature classroom – “lazy” as it seemed to me at first –gets my students to think critically and participate in the course on a much deeper level. An added benefit is that the experience of getting in front of the classroom on a regular basis makes students more comfortable with collaboration and peer review, qualities I’ve seen emerge through various in-class and online activities I’ve since designed to build off of the success of the Discussion Openers.
If you are a graduate student and have experiences teaching literature that you would like to share on this blog, please contact Tim Hetland.