I recently taught Franz Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” to my summer school students. It is a difficult text, if only because students’ responses tend to be simply that it’s very weird (it is, and that’s why I love it). In truth, the story is difficult because it is so dense and because it’s so far from anything most first year college students expect in a story. While the prose is matter-of-fact, the story itself is not. My students are not particularly attuned to the idea that a short story might be a parable – and because students in introduction to literature courses generally do not read slowly and deliberately, they will frequently miss important details that help illuminate meaning.
In addition to teaching this story, I also decided that it was time to begin working on getting my students to interact with one another. So far, they have been willing to respond to my questions, but they haven’t quite made the move to discussing the texts with one another. They’ll talk to one another while I’m not in the room (I’ve sometimes left the room for this very reason), but not necessarily while I’m there. Those interactions are a bit more hesitant.
To begin to work on this, I assigned each student a set of questions about “A Hunger Artist,” questions simply drawn from an instructor’s manual. Each student had to first briefly summarize the plot of the story, then answer two more complex, interpretive questions that required delving into the material carefully. I gave them ten minutes to do this.
When we came back together as a group, we went around sharing answers, and responding deliberately to those answers.
Here’s what I did:
- Student A answered a question.
- I asked Student B to summarize what had just been relayed.
- I asked Student A if that was an accurate summary.
- I asked Student C if she agreed with what A and B had said (and why).
And so on. After a bit of this, the students began to build on what the others said. When we got stuck in responses, I pointed to passages in the story and had them paraphrase those and link them back to their original answers.
Because it’s a small group, my students are more willing to think out loud than they would be in a class of 20 or 25. And that’s particularly important with a difficult text like Kafka’s. By having them wrestle on their own with complex questions and then think aloud – and together – I was able to help them gradually recognize the parable of the story. Being deliberative with my students – and that means being conscious of my own wait-time as the instructor, too – meant that they were able to make discoveries, which, as far as I’m concerned, is part of the joy of reading and discussing literature
This is a nice technique. It is part of learning to listen empatheticly. When I do this in Interpersonal, I don’t do quite as much supervision as you’re suggesting you do, but I’m looking for slightly different results. It’s not the third party text, but the text opposite you that I’m trying to get students to respond to – and that’s not any easier than Kafka.
I was on the receiving end of this technique last summer at the Foundation for Critical Thinking’s conference. It is directive and it is a little bit unnatural, but it’s also incredibly effective — even in a room with a bunch of college professors. It reminds us that we don’t always listen to one another when we’re in a group situation.