Emily Isaacson – Page 4

Shifting Genres

When I was a child, and my dad was a theater grad student, he adapted a couple of short stories into plays (one was Walter Wangerin Jr.’s “Lily” and the other was Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.”). I remember the plays only hazily, but I was always struck by how interesting it was to shift the genre. It’s certainly something that filmmakers do all the time – how many film versions of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre are there, after all?

Sometimes we complain about adaptations – some of us feel that they’re misrepresentations of the work on the page. Ultimately, though, they’re interpretations. It’s obvious that a Shakespearean adaptation is an interpretation – it’s drama, so it’s meant to be interpreted. But shifting from one non-performance genre to another – a short story to a play, a poem to prose – might seem like something that we purists don’t really like (and I admit to often being one of those purists).

However, I think that we can use that genre shift in the classroom. Some of the other bloggers here have suggested encouraging students to shift genres in their own creative writing. I think we should consider doing it from time to time in the literature classroom as well. Having students rewrite something – or even act out something – as a classroom exercise is an interpretive act that requires them to pay attention to details and pay attention to theme. It can help students untangle that which they find confusing. Continue reading “Shifting Genres”

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? Continue reading “Course Outcomes and Reading Skills”

Fundamental and Powerful Concepts

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. Continue reading “Fundamental and Powerful Concepts”

Groups of Three

Recently, I attended the International Conference on Critical Thinking and Education Reform in Berkeley, California. My primary purpose in attending the conference was to bring back ideas for my institution’s Critical Thinking Program, which I coordinate. But I also spent a good bit of time thinking about my own classroom, and particularly how I can better engage my students. As I process the various things that I learned at the conference, I will share some of them with you in this space. So this is just the first of what I hope to be several posts.

Unlike other academic conferences that I attend, this one is particularly oriented towards practical workshop exercises, where participants engage in some of the activities that might work in the classroom. One of my workshop leaders divided us up into groups of three, assigning each of us a role: questioner, answerer, and observer. We were then tasked with defining a major concept (in our session, they were concepts like education, schooling and leadership). The answerer had to define the term, the questioner then asked questions for clarification and precision, and the observer took notes and then explained back to the others in the workshop what had just occurred.

I’ve read about this sort of discussion technique, but I’ve never really been a part of it. I found it incredibly effective, particularly because I found myself having to clarify my own thinking on certain concepts. And so I’ve been thinking about ways that this might be productive for the literature classroom.

Continue reading “Groups of Three”

Shakespeare in Another Form

I am not a purist when it comes to film adaptations of Shakespeare. I love Orson Welles’ truncated versions of plays; I love Akira Kurosawa’s loose adaptations of Macbeth and Lear; and I cannot recommend highly enough the dark comedy of Scotland, PA (four words: Christopher Walken as Macduff). I’ve written before about my use of the president’s speech in Independence Day and Peter Sellers’ Richard III speaking “Hard Day’s Night.” I think that it’s important to share some of these films with students – not just for the experience of seeing the work of great filmmakers, but also for the opportunity to discuss Shakespeare’s central role in much of our culture.

The last time I taught my Shakespeare course, I developed a movie night assignment for my students. I offered six movie nights over the course of the semester, and students were required to attend one movie and write a commentary on it. (They could earn extra credit for an additional movie – and several of the students enjoyed the films so much that they attended all of the screenings, which were also open to the whole student body.)

On the assignment sheet, I explained that the assignment had three primary objectives:

to encourage students to consider the implications of viewing a Shakespearean play, rather than reading it
to encourage students to consider the assumptions underlying directors’ interpretations of plays, either through a fairly straightforward rendering of the text or a radical reinterpretation of the text
to encourage students to appreciate that at the core of the study of drama is the need to recognize the role that performance plays in our interpretation of a play as an audience

Continue reading “Shakespeare in Another Form”

Film in the Classroom

Many of us use film clips in the classroom when we teach plays, especially when we teach Shakespeare. This makes a great deal of sense, as we’re teaching something that’s meant to be seen. But how do we actually use these clips? Or even full films? And why are we doing this, from a pedagogical standpoint?

I’ve used portions of films so that students understand what’s happening in the play. For example, watching the ending of A Doll’s House has more emotional impact on students than only reading it, which increases their appreciation for the play. So, there’s utility there. But sometimes this method feels almost like a cop-out to me. I worry that I’m showing students a lengthy (30 minute) clip just to avoid having to actually lead discussion.

So I’ve been working on using film in other ways – beyond simply making sure that students understand the plot.

Plays are, of course, highly collaborative in nature. That collaboration continues well after the playwright is dead, since the plays continue to be performed and re-imagined by various and varied directors. This is especially true in Shakespearean plays; each director imagines a different version of Shakespeare, each actor brings something different to the role, and the filming can draw our attention to different aspects of a scene or soliloquy. I’ve found it useful to compare these collaborations, and thus far I’ve attempted this sort of comparative work with Hamlet (in intro to lit) and King Lear (in my senior-level Shakespeare course). Continue reading “Film in the Classroom”

Shock Value

I have to confess that I take a great deal of delight in teaching “A Rose for Emily” to my introduction to literature students. It’s a wonderful story to talk about sequence versus chronology, foreshadowing, and concepts of time. But it’s getting to the shocking ending that’s most fun for me.

It’s one of the few stories where I walk students through everything piece-by-piece, mapping out the major plot points on the board. I do this, in part, because it’s helpful to have all those disparate plot points in visual form (the students figure out that the arsenic and the smell are connected once they see everything written up on the board). I also do this because I typically teach the story at a time in the semester when the students are worn out and class participation has dropped off.

We walk through the sequence of the story, and then we read the final section of the story aloud (okay, I read it). I love to pause at the line “The man himself lay in the bed.” And we get to that closing sentence about the iron gray hair. Continue reading “Shock Value”

Teaching Difficult Texts

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. Continue reading “Teaching Difficult Texts”

Pop Culture and Teaching Shakespeare

When I teach literature – any of it really, but Shakespeare in particular – I have a tendency to use references to popular culture to help my students make sense of the texts they read, and in particular, the characters that populate them.

For example, I’ve pointed out to students that there’s a certain Cartman (of South Park)-esque “Respect my authoritah” attitude in much of Richard III’s interactions with other characters (other Cartman catch-phrases work equally well with Richard II, incidentally). I’ve also taken great advantage of YouTube clips to draw students into an understanding of the cultural relevance of Shakespeare: we’ve watched a video of Peter Sellers reciting The Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night” in the style of Laurence Olivier’s Richard III, and we’ve compared the President’s speech in Independence Day to Olivier’s rendition of the St. Crispin’s Day speech.

These aren’t simply gimmicks to encourage student interest; aside from my own appreciation for pop culture, I have a larger purpose in introducing these comparisons, a purpose based in my own educational training. Taking its cues from cognitive psychology, constructivist educational philosophy* suggests that we organize all of our experiences and all of our knowledge in “cognitive schema.” Essentially, we build information on already existing knowledge and attempt to make sense of new information based on those structures of understanding. In order to facilitate significant learning and thinking, educators need to create a sense of cognitive dissonance – a point where the student must grapple with information that does not fit within his or her cognitive schemata. From this point of dissonance, individuals construct their own understanding of information. Continue reading “Pop Culture and Teaching Shakespeare”

Planning for the Summer

I suspect that most of us who teach at the college or university level look forward to summer not because we don’t have to teach, but because it’s an opportunity to focus our working hours on research and our development as faculty members. Of course, we create lists of writing and research projects that we want to work on – and my lists are always overly ambitious, to say the least.

But I think it’s also important to create reading lists. While I do take some time to read lighter fare (I’m looking forward to Nicole Peeler’s next installment in her Jane True series, for example), I like to create an academic reading list for the summer. I’ve generally tried to have a theme: a writer’s entire body of work or major works from a particular literary era where there is a gap in my own education. So, I’ve had summers of William Faulkner, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare (I’m an early modern scholar, not a Shakespearean per se), nineteenth century British novels (that one really just meant Vanity Fair and several Hardy novels).

I’m currently casting about for what my reading list should focus on this summer. I have a book to review for an academic journal and research-related reading to do, but that’s not the sort of reading that I’m talking about. Likely, I’ll settle on Ben Jonson’s work – I haven’t read many of his tragedies. Though, as I write this, I have to say that Frances Burney’s work also sounds appealing to me right now. I’m still undecided. Continue reading “Planning for the Summer”