One of the sessions that I attended at this summer’s International Conference on Critical Thinking was about “Fundamental and Powerful Concepts,” which is, itself, a fundamental concept in the Paul and Elder critical thinking paradigm.
First, a note on the Paul and Elder paradigm, which I’ve written about before: the paradigm divides the basic processes of thought into eight “elements of thought.” For every thought we have, we actually engage in all eight, whether we’re aware of it or not – that is, I’m always thinking from a point of view and making use of assumptions, consciously or unconsciously, whenever I solve any problems, whether it’s what shoes to wear or how to untangle a complex idea in an article that I’m trying to write. Concepts are, well, concepts. They’re the big ideas that we use to collect disparate pieces of information into groups. As we advance to further levels of expertise within a discipline, those concepts become more specific and more rarified. For example, in introduction to literature, one of the fundamental concepts we deal with is “literature,” but when we move towards more expertise, we can begin to think about “genre” as a concept or even a specific genre.
In every field, there are myriad concepts – and we certainly cannot get to them all when we teach a single course. That’s what this particular session was about: trying to focus on the most important, the most fundamental, the most powerful concept within a particular course. The session leader, Gerald Nosich, suggested that fundamental and powerful concepts are those that, should a student understand them deeply, he or she would understand a great deal of the rest of the course. If a student begins to understand the concepts, the rest of the material of the course should fall into place, as the student refines her or his understanding of the material and the information.
When it comes down to it, Nosich explained, concepts are key terms: they’re not sentences. Those sentences contain assumptions and interpretations based on the concepts. Nosich argued, for example, that “honesty” is a concept; “Honesty is the best policy” is an assumption, not a concept.
So I’ve been thinking about those fundamental and powerful concepts for my own literature courses – both my intro course and my upper division courses. The suggestion is that there really should only be three to four fundamental and powerful concepts, and that these should come into focus in each class period. That’s not to say that there are no other concepts in the course, but that these three or four are the central ones to the work of the class.
In the workshop itself, I thought through a course I’m hoping to teach this spring (and I grant it’s an upper division course, not intro to lit, but bear with me): Early Modern Drama. As far as fundamental concepts go, I think drama and early modern are fairly obvious. Drama is a form of literature that has specific conventions, specific ways of interacting with an audience, and early modern drama as a concept is quite different from our modern conception of the genre; early modern is a relatively standard term in literary studies, but is not necessarily one that is familiar to undergraduates, and furthermore is central to understanding the difference between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and our own day.
But what to use for a third concept?
I think this is something that can come from our own approach to literature, and the theoretical underpinnings of our own scholarly work. I’ve been heavily influenced by New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, and Cultural Studies in general. Thus, I think that culture is an important concept – and not just “Elizabethan and Jacobean culture,” but culture as a broader idea. What, fundamentally is culture? That’s a question, should the students engage with it, that will illuminate the entire class. They will have a way to approach the texts; they will be able to do the work of literary criticism.
So what to take back to Introduction to Literature?
Clearly, as I’ve already said, the concept of “literature” is important. So too is the concept “interpretation.” But that third thing might depend upon your own preferred literary theory. Someone whose teaching is inflected by Reader Response theory would undoubtedly want to think about the fundamental concept of the reader. Perhaps someone of a more Formalist bent might be more concerned with the concept “text” or “poetics.”
Focusing in some way on those concepts throughout the semester can change the way that we approach the material – and I think that it can move us beyond thinking simply about what happened next in the story or what color a character was wearing.
What concepts are at the heart of the things you teach?