Course Outcomes and Reading Skills

I’ve been thinking a great deal about course objectives lately, partly because we just began a new semester, and partly because my current institution is working to implement some new standards for our syllabi – they’re now encouraging us to include the relevant general education and/or program outcomes on the syllabus, not just the outcomes for the individual course.  One of the things that I noticed in looking at the various outcomes (my own, my department’s, and my institutions) is that there’s quite a different approach in the general education outcomes and my own department’s outcomes for literature courses.  The institution’s outcomes focus on content (albeit in a rather broad way), but the department’s primary goals for graduates focus instead on skills, like being able to read critically and write clearly.

My own course outcomes – whether for an introduction to literature course or an upper division course – probably split the difference: I provide outcomes that link skills to the specific content of the course.

I’ve been trying to link this back to one of the major maxims of the Foundation for Critical Thinking, as I look over my notes from their recent conference: they suggest that, in fact, content is a way of thinking.  The two do not have to be separate.  Content is not simply something to memorize, but content in a course is a problem to be solved.

So what does that really mean?  Especially for a literature class?

I think in part it means that we need to teach students not to memorize static bits of information (who killed Polonius? What does it say on the side of Arnold Friend’s car? What was on the pillow next to Homer Barron’s remains?), but how to find that information and how to make sense of that information.  It doesn’t really matter if the student knows that Hamlet accidentally killed Polonius, or that Arnold Friend’s car says “Man the Flying Saucers,” or that the pillow bore a strand of iron gray hair, if the student doesn’t know how to interpret that information.  Remembering – or knowing where to find – that information is simply the first step.

But that information is so often a struggle, I’ve found, both as a professor and even as a student myself.  I wonder if part of the problem is that we’re not always teaching students to read deliberatively: do students read short stories the same way they read their Intro to Sociology textbook?  Do students try to skim, looking only at first sentences of paragraphs, in an effort to locate topic sentences?  Do students actually read the poems that we assign them?  (I’m probably better at talking to students about reading plays, because that’s the one genre that I know students struggle with when it’s on the page.)

And so, I think one of our central goals in all literature classes – and particularly in introductory classes – is that we are teaching students to be better readers.

This also means that we need to be conscious in the classroom of walking our students through the steps of better reading: no matter the skill level of our students, all can use some conversation about how to better read what’s on the page.

Here’s the beginning of my list of reminders that students need to be better readers.  I’d love to have you add your own in the comments.

1. Slow down.  Literature is supposed to be savored.  Also, you won’t remember it if you skim it.
2. Use the dictionary.  Make a note of what the word means.  Don’t simply rely on context clues.
3. Watch for repetitions of images and patterns.  If they’re there more, they’re worth thinking about.
4. Make notes of anything that reminds you of something else, whether it’s a connection with another text, or a connection within this text.
5. For a narrative piece, keep a running list of characters beside you.
6. Read it again.