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.

Hetland: What kind of class discussions has the novel inspired?

Templeton: I begin the first class with two YouTube videos: one that is NBC’s live coverage of the attack and the other is a documentary called “Falling Man,” which is about media representations of the event focusing on the photographs of the bodies falling from the top of the towers before their collapse.

After that, we talk briefly about what we remember about that day. ELIC is particularly interesting in this respect because the majority of my students would have been the same age as one of the narrators.

In addition, we discuss what the relationship might be between art and current events. What kind of responsibility do writers and other artists have to engage the major events of their time? How soon is too soon? We also continue discussions of other themes that have been a constant throughout the semester: textual form, gender, consumption, and technology.

Hetland: Have you developed ways to help your students approach the text?

Templeton: The videos make a big difference.

Hetland: Generally, how do students respond to the text?

Templeton: They generally love it and are very emotional about the novel’s conclusion.

If you teach or have taught a 9/11 text and would like to share your experience, contact Tim Hetland via email (timhetland@gmail.com) or through Twitter (@timhetland)

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:

• a group that presented on Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food by having the class participate in a blind taste-test featuring organic and non-organic oranges.
• a group that critiqued a text on the interactivity of video games by showing veterans’ reactions to World War II-themed games such as Call of Duty and Medal of Honor.
• a Scandinavian student who brought in examples of local poetry from his birth country to show thematic parallels between it and Beowulf.

After this portion of the Discussion Opener, students lead class discussion on the assigned texts and the contextual materials they’ve chosen. Usually this takes about a third of the class period; however, when groups do an exceptional job, it’s not uncommon for them to spend the entire class leading discussion from front of the room. Not only does this assignment minimize the amount of prep I need to do, it prompts students to learn more pro-actively, which goes a long way in helping them understand content and succeed in the course.  Sometimes it’s difficult for them to see that the point of the Discussion Opener is not rote regurgitation, but rather an opportunity to spark a constructive, class-wide discussion. On the other side of the coin, I sometimes need to step in during a Discussion Opener to keep the conversation from going too far off track thanks to an overabundance of enthusiasm on the part of students. By and large, though, this approach to discussion in the literature classroom – “lazy” as it seemed to me at first –gets my students to think critically and participate in the course on a much deeper level.  An added benefit is that the experience of getting in front of the classroom on a regular basis makes students more comfortable with collaboration and peer review,  qualities I’ve seen emerge through various in-class and online activities I’ve since designed to build off of the success of the Discussion Openers.

If you are a graduate student and have experiences teaching literature that you would like to share on this blog, please contact Tim Hetland.

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.

As we find ourselves in the middle of the semester—and our students likely entrenched in reading and discussing texts—it is a good time to stop and have a conversation about how to read. I encourage you to take a day, or even just fifteen minutes, to discuss with students ways to engage in texts, so they can be better prepared to talk (and write) about what they read.

A simple way to get the conversation started in your class is to ask: What are you going to highlight/underline/mark-up? And why are you going highlight/underline/mark-up those sections?

Most students do some combination of highlighting, underlining, and marking up of their texts, but ask them what kind of system they use. Ask why they highlight and underline and how their markups translate into actionable pieces of information for discussion, and you’ll probably get a slew of varying answers and a few blank stares.

Talk to your students about establishing a mark-up system. A system where they highlight for one purpose, underline for another, use little stars for another reason altogether. The system does not have to be complicated to work. Simply being consistent in marking for the same purposes throughout the text will help students as they thumb through their texts in class to quickly identify questions they had, areas of interest they pulled out, and points of connections they might have made.

The same thing goes for marginalia: it helps to have a system. Maybe the system means putting dots in the margins as they read so as to stay on track, check marks next to areas that our found to be important, and question marks next to areas where questions arise. Marginal notes need to be useful. If they’re not part of a larger strategy, they will probably sit on their pages, never to be brought up in class discussion.

One final but important point:  before we assign a text, we should explain why we’re assigning it. I don’t mean to suggest a kind of blasé justification, but instead an explanation of how the text fits into the course, why we are reading it in this order, why it is important in the context of the course, and what themes it may touch on. When a student gets this information before they read, they can better know what to look for in the text and what they may be able to pull out for conversation. In the first memory above, I had lots to say about In Pharaoh’s Army but suspected that my observations might not have been relevant to the goals of the course; that was because I never understood how the book pertained to the course. It was listed in the syllabus, but not explained or contextualized. Let your students know why you’ve chosen each text and how it relates to the course themes and goals. It can really help them develop a reading strategy, one that helps to create conversation content.

Sometimes we complain about our students’ (in)abilities to discuss a text in full force. Sure, sometimes they don’t do the reading and therefore don’t have anything to say in class. However, often times, they have done the reading but are unsure of or don’t know how to discuss the text in the academic setting. Take some time to teach reading strategies. It’s worth it: you’ll not only enhance participation—you’ll help your students enjoy the benefits of fruitful and challenging intellectual discussion. After all, that’s what they’re here for.

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.

For the sake of an example, let’s say I was using ClassDojo in my literature classroom to measure discussion participation (of course, you could use another service or method—the purpose here is to illustrate using a service that creates actionable data). Every time a student spoke or responded to a question or did some other activity that I defined as participation, I would simply click on that student’s name in ClassDojo and add one participation point to the student’s profile. At first, this data would not be worth a lot, but over time, as the data sample grew, as it could be compared to data of other students and to the class as a whole entity, it could become incredibly valuable. I could use the data to identify students who were participating daily, but who were only saying one or two things per session; I could identify students who participated heavily during one week and rarely during another; or, I could use the data to make an accurate assessment of a student’s participation at the end of a semester—all things that without good participation data would not be possible, or would be incredibly difficult to produce and quantify. Second, the data could be used to help me reflect on how I structured my course and planned my lessons. For example, if I could see data that showed that the whole class commonly participated in discussion during week A but not during week B, I would be forced to think about the texts I’d chosen or the lessons I’d used during those weeks. I could use the data to see what texts created the most discussion and what texts created the least discussion. And I could take all the data, which I would not have if I had simply put a mark next to a students name at the end of the after determining that they had “participated,” and I could act on it, making changes and adjustments to the way I taught the course or at least facilitated textual discussion.

In other words, if I had solid data about discussion participation, broken down by date, time frequency of occurrence, student, student groups, and the class, I could have a better understanding of how and when my students were participating. I could also have quantified feedback on how well the course, my lessons, and my texts provoked and encouraged discussion. Of course, there are many holes in a data sample created by a service like ClassDojo, and I am not suggesting that we base how we teach on how well we record student participation. But at the very least a service like ClassDojo requires us all to consider the same question my wife asked me: “If the literature classroom is all about participation in discussion, how do you guys keep track of it?”

For more information about ClassDojo you can visit their site by clicking here. Another service that aims to help record class data called MyClassTalk is available on ios devices and can be found at the app store in iTunes.

What do you think? How might access to classroom data help you assess and better reach your students?

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.

To set up your course #hashtag, just include it in a tweet (you can also set up an official archive of your #hashtag through a service like TwapperKeeper). Before you create a #hashtag for your course, consider two things: its uniqueness and length. First, because #hashtags are not private and anyone can attach yours to their tweet, make your course #hashtag rare enough to limit outside use. For example, if you’re teaching a course on postmodern literature (listed as English 467), avoid a tag such as #pomolit and go for something that the general population is not likely to use, such as #pmlit467. Outside use of your course tag will make it more difficult for you and your students to find course tweets.  Second, consider the length of your #hashtag. Tweets can be only 140 characters long, so if students need to include the #hashtag in their responses, you need to keep the tag brief. Students may already feel constrained by 140 characters, so it’s best not to cramp them even more with a long, required hashtag. Make it as brief and unusual as possible.

Twitter lends itself nicely to the discussion needs of a literature course. It provides an easy-to-use platform for engagement, while allowing students to maintain their privacy. Tweeting in your course may take time to get used to and requires some initial prep and instructions; but once you get the formalities out of the way, your class can participate in an ongoing, social conversation that helps extend textual engagement outside of the classroom— while providing a basis for conversation inside of it.

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?

Marshall:  Students can live-tweet books, poems, and short stories as they read or during the lecture (TIM: Live tweeting is essentially tweeting thoughts, questions and experiences while reading a text or listening to the lecture). I live-tweeted a book once (Rapture Ready), and the author (who writes for The Daily Show) responded to me a few times. Literature teachers could also use Twitter to teach theory, asking students to tweet about the same passage/text from different theoretical perspectives (feminist, psychological, etc.).

Hetland: What has worked for you—in terms of using Twitter as a teaching tool?

Marshall:  Twitter has sparked solid, thoughtful discussions outside the classroom, particularly after in-class screenings of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and the documentary Religulous. Both films are controversial, so both provoked interesting commentary. From my perspective, Twitter aided in helping students realize why they believed what they did and why others believed what they did. Seeing both sides of the issue isn’t always something that can be done in a relatively discussion-less class of 120+ students.

Hetland: What hasn’t worked for you?

Marshall:  Students not participating. Students only tweeting the required amount for a grade but not really engaging with others. Students who are too outspoken and who don’t have good social boundaries (I’ve only experienced this in the last semester though; otherwise, it’s not much of a problem).

Hetland: Let’s say I want to use Twitter in my course for the first time. What advice would you give me?

Marshall:  Think of it as an experiment; it may or may not go smoothly (count on the latter). But learn from those mishaps, modify your assignments, and if you like it and think it’s useful, fire it up again next semester. Also, keep in mind that while studies out there show Millennials as being super tech-savvy, that’s not completely true. The instructor needs to walk them through much of the Twitter process, particularly hashtags, and suggest platforms for them to use as the web interface isn’t that user-friendly for first-timers, IMHO (I always suggest Tweetdeck).

Next week I will follow up some of these comments with a look at how to actually structure a classroom’s discussion on Twitter, but for now, feel free to add your own experiences using Twitter in the literature classroom in the comments below.

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).

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.”

To be clear, Campbell did not base her text selection on whether or not her class would “like” the book. Instead, she based her selection on the perceived needs of her students and on the idea that a chosen text should encourage student success in the classroom. Some might argue that if a text is central to a theme or time period it should not be discarded because of its difficulty; others might that claim the English classroom should, above all, be rigorous and not too heavily influenced by how students are perceived to be able to handle a text. But there is something absolutely generous and refreshing about Campbell’s decision. Her decision reminds us that despite the fact that choosing a text is a simple task made difficult by the countless parties and politics involved, it is also a task that can and should be influenced by an understanding of the needs of our students.

Campbell, like countless other literature professors and teachers, provides us with a good example of how to head into a semester with a student-centric view of the classroom, a view that when enacted can truly encourage, foster, and develop student success alongside student learning and intellectual engagement.

Inevitably, in choosing a text we should carefully consider the needs of our departments and institutions, the trends of our fields, and the thematic requisites of our courses; but we should also consider our students. And we should remember that though students come to our classrooms from different degree programs, with different skills, and by way of different routes, they all should leave our classrooms with a more complex and contextualized view of the world. The success of this goal certainly does not end with text selection, but it does begin with it.