Author: Tim Hetland

Teaching the Fiction of 9/11: Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

This is the second entry in a series on teaching the literature of 9/11. Dr. Erin Templeton, Assistant Professor of English and the Anne Morrison Chapman Distinguished Chair of International Study at Converse College, answered a few questions about her experiences teaching 9/11 fiction.

Hetland: What 9/11 texts do you teach?

Templeton: I teach both Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (ELIC) by Jonathan Safran Foer and selections from an American literature anthology.

Hetland: What classes do you use the texts in?

Templeton: ELIC is part of an upper-level contemporary American novels course; the anthology pieces are for the second half of our American Literature survey (1865-Present; 9/11 is as close as we get to the Present).

Hetland: Why have you chosen to teach Safran Foer’s novel?

Templeton: Because 1) it is a terrific novel and teaches well, and 2) because it also presents us with other issues that jive well with other books on the syllabus, specifically with issues of textual materiality and form, narrative perspective, and relationships between past and present and between older and younger generations. Continue reading “Teaching the Fiction of 9/11: Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”

Teaching Literature: Student Contexts and Discussion Openers

BuntingToday’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:

Do We Teach Students How to Read?

To begin, two short memories.  First, I’m sitting in my first undergraduate literature class. We’re reading Tobias Wolf’s In Pharaoh’s Army and I am captivated by the text’s structure and enthralled by the provocative storytelling. But, despite the fact that I have done my reading, I am stuck in my chair not knowing how to contribute to the discussion. I read the assigned chapters, but simply don’t know what to say about them in the context of this class. They were beautiful, emotional, surprising, but I’m not sure how to translate my reading experience to this critical and curious conversation occurring around me. And so I sit, gripping my text, listening but feeling lost.

Second, it is years later and I am now sitting in my first graduate literature seminar. We’re reading Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Almanac of the Dead and again I feel lost. By the end of my undergraduate career I was fairly adroit in literary conversation, but that was for the undergrad classroom. What’s going on around me now is completely different, including the sound of the conversation. The words and sentences being used to describe the text sound almost foreign to me. Again, I loved the book; and again, I was completely captivated by the narrative; but again, I am essentially at a loss for how to contribute to this scholarly roundtable discussion.

I know that these memories of classroom difficulties are probably not universal. On the other hand, I know that many students, undergraduate and graduate alike, struggle with how to read a text for class. And not because they can’t read in the conventional sense of the word, but because reading for the sake of scholarly conversation is difficult and requires an understating of how to approach a text with practical and critical strategies. Continue reading “Do We Teach Students How to Read?”

Can Class Participation Data Help Us Teach Literature?

My wife, who teaches kindergarten, just started using a new web service called ClassDojo. On their website, ClassDojo claims to be a service for real-time behavior management: teachers input their roster, structure what kind of behaviors they want to measure, and then start using the service in the classroom by logging student behavior through a one-click action. The service catalogues the inputted behavior and creates reports for the teacher so that she can see how individual students or the class as a whole are performing in the various categories. To make it really easy for teachers, ClassDojo also has a mobile application that allows for quick and on-the-go recording of student behavior. This service is designed for K-12 educators and so it may not be all that interesting or useful for literature teachers in higher education. At least, I initially thought so. But when my wife was telling me how she used the service in her class of wild 5- to 6-year-olds to track behaviors such as class participation, I started to think differently. And, in that moment of contemplation, my wife turned to me and asked, “If the literature classroom is all about participation in discussion, how do you guys really keep track of it?” Good question.

My wife was right, the literature classroom is often structured around the discussion of a text—and class participation, either graded or un-graded, is important to the whole enterprise. Yet, the way we structure participation varies from class to class and tends to be potentially more assumptive than quantitative. Some teachers may reward students with daily participation points (which are generally somewhat nebulously defined); others may base student participation on the completion of daily assignments; and still others may encourage participation but may not worry about measuring it or keeping track of it in their grade books. However we assess participation in the classroom, there are often a few things that are easy to identify: namely, who participates the most and who participates the least. Students who fall on either end of the participation spectrum generally, for better or worse, tend to stick out. But what about the students in the middle? How do we understand their levels of participation? And further, can our current methods of assessing participation generate enough actionable data that can help us better understand our students and courses? Of course, participation data should not drive our literature classrooms, but it could help to enhance them. Continue reading “Can Class Participation Data Help Us Teach Literature?”

Twitter in the Literature Classroom? Part 2

Last week on this blog Kelli Marshall explained how Twitter can be used as a discussion tool in the literature classroom. Building on that, I want to look at the nitty-gritty of what to consider if you decide to experiment with Twitter in your course.

There are three main things you and your students need to know to have a good conversation on Twitter.

  1. How to tweet.
  2. How to @reply or @mention people.
  3. How to use #hashtags.

Tweeting is pretty simple and is similar to SMS texting—though you may want to show students how to shorten links (through services like bitly.com) and provide them with rules for decorum. @Replying or @mentioning people is also really easy: you can either hit the reply button below a person’s tweet, or, in your own tweet, type in that person’s Twitter handle preceded by the @ symbol. Either way, that person will be notified of your reply and can then tweet back to you, a system that encourages conversation.

Using #hashtags is also simple but requires some initial setup. A #hashtag is something that you include in a tweet in order to categorize it. #Hashtags are commonly used in tweets that mention trending world or local events; they are also created for conferences and gatherings. Basically, #hashtags bring together tweets that are related by topic area. The easiest way to set up a discussion for your class is to create a course-specific #hashtag and have your students include it in any of their course-related posts. Then you can all search for the #hashtag on Twitter (or by using a service like hashtags.org) and find an up-to-date listing of all tweets that include it. Continue reading “Twitter in the Literature Classroom? Part 2”

Twitter in the Literature Classroom? Part 1

Twitter lends itself to discussion. It’s quick, easy, and—with its strict structure and economy of space—forces writers to condense their thoughts while maintaining coherence. Unlike other social networking sites, Twitter does not require you to follow (or “friend”) others in order to see their posts; Twitter allows you to read the conversations of anyone you’d like, mitigating some (though, not all) of the privacy issues that might lead us away from using social media sites in the classroom. There has been a considerable amount of discussion on various sites and academic blogs about using Twitter in academic settings (see the Profhacker blog: here, here, or most recently, here), Bill Wolff’s blog, the site, Emerging EdTech or here at Bedford Bits and Lit Bits. Some bloggers have discussed how to use Twitter for research and engagement among academics, while others have examined how and why to use Twitter as a classroom tool. Over at Kelli Marshall’s blog is a candid and detailed post on using Twitter as a discussion tool in some of the film courses Marshall has taught. She explains that while some students have resisted using the site, they have generally produced great comments about the course’s content and have participated in thoughtful conversations, even beyond the classroom. As Marshall also teaches literature courses, I asked her a few questions about her experience using Twitter and how it might be applied to a literature classroom.

Hetland:  How might Twitter benefit our classroom / students / student discussion?

Marshall: Giving shyer students a voice. Continuing in-class discussion outside the classroom. Forcing students to get to the “meat” of their argument/opinion (i.e., the 140 character limit). Encouraging students to interact with others online, i.e., classmates, me (!), students in other parts of the US/world, celebrities, film directors, etc.

Hetland:  How could Twitter be used in a literature classroom?

Continue reading “Twitter in the Literature Classroom? Part 1”

Teaching the Literature of 9/11

Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man (Scribner, 2007) begins with the main character, Keith Neudecker, walking out from the rubble of the World Trade Center. Dazed and slightly injured, Keith first appears to the reader emerging from the ashes of the terrorist attack, moving away from the destruction. But, DeLillo explains, as Keith moves away from the carnage of the World Trade Center he also enters into an entirely new world: a world created in the trauma and by the trauma of September 11, 2001.

DeLillo begins his novel by invoking the way in which 9/11 is collectively discussed in popular culture and media: as a day that we emerged from, changed; as a day we moved into a changed world. Like Keith, we’re told that we are moving away from the trauma and into a world colored by the political, social, and cultural aftereffects of that day. This emergent movement is detailed in DeLillo’s novel, and also in a growing body of literature that either directly or indirectly takes up the events of 9/11. These works of fiction, including Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Ken Kalfus’ A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, are increasingly being taught in literature classrooms across the country and are encouraging critical discussions about the pre- and post-9/11 world.

With the ten-year anniversary of 9/11taking place this semester, I would like to devote some space in this column to an ongoing conversation with those of you who have taught or who are teaching works of fiction that deal with 9/11. If you have experiences or thoughts on teaching a 9/11 text and would like to share them with your colleagues and peers, please post a comment or contact me via email (timhetland@gmail.com) or through Twitter (@timhetland).

How Should We Choose Texts?

As the fall is upon us and most universities and colleges have just started classes, I thought it appropriate to consider something central to the planning of a literature course: choosing what texts to read in a class.

Of course, there are many reasons that we might decide to have our class read a certain text: the text meets departmental requirements, it’s important to a particular field of study, it’s a part of a traditional canon or it’s distinctly outside of a traditional cannon, it’s trendy (though would we admit that?), it’s a personal favorite, or it reinforces one of the goals of the class. But these reasons, no matter how important, only indirectly consider the primary members of the class: the students.

So, the question is: how much influence do/should the students of a class have on text selection?

During the recent barrage of posts appearing on my social media feeds these past few weeks relating to crafting new syllabi for the upcoming academic year, one particular message really stood out and spoke to this question. The message was sent out by Donna Campbell, a professor of American literature at Washington State University; in it Campbell wrote that after seeing that her class was composed of a variety of students from all academic levels and majors, she decided to cancel a particular Henry James text.

I was curious about her decision to nix the text from her syllabus just days before class, based on preliminary information about her students, so I asked Dr. Campbell about her choice. Her reply?  A striking example of student-centric pedagogy. She said, “I substituted another text because it seemed to me that with students at so many levels of preparation, beginning with an author as complex as James might tend to discourage some of them. We’d usually have some time to build up to James, but in this particular course he would have been nearly the first author they encountered, and I wanted them to have a more positive experience.” Continue reading “How Should We Choose Texts?”