In the fall, I had the students put together an exhibition of their work. This spring, I coordinated with my department chair, who taught the other upper-division literature course, to have the students put on a mini conference where students gave brief presentations about their work.

Students who take the creative option must still write a researched introduction, but they’re otherwise given free rein to do what they want.  Letting them explore literature in this way not only gives them the opportunity to make connections between the material and their own interests, but also gives them the opportunity to really shine.

And shine they did.

One student used social media to explore Katherine Mansfield’s stories, another created a board game based on Northanger Abbey; someone created a commonplace book of tips for how to get by in Bath (also based on research about Jane Austen), while another wrote and performed songs based on Wide Sargasso Sea.  Students in both semesters developed thoughtful lesson plans using the works that we read; both semesters, students reworked pieces of literature as film scripts. And the students who opted for traditional papers wrote some incredibly thoughtful and thorough scholarship.

Sometimes I bemoan the fact that I don’t know how to teach students to be creative.  This semester in particular, I was reminded that they already are — and that I just need to give them room to be so.

For this week’s post, we have gathered a collection of great posts on poetry, using technology and culture to engage students, and writing as a social action.

Holly Pappas, Gen Ed Poetry: Finding a Real Toad or Two

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/literature/gen-ed-poetry-finding-a-real-toad-or-two/archived/

Holly Pappas offers an assignment that will help engage students who are overwhelmed by or bored with poetry, and explains to her students that they don’t need perfect understanding to appreciate what is happening in a poem.

Joelle Hahn, Poetry, Proliferating

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/uncategorized/poetry-proliferating/archived/

Technology has made an undeniable impact on the written word, and Joelle presents a variety of online resources for navigating online poetry.

Traci Gardner, Using Pop Culture to Hook Students on Poetry

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/teaching-with-technology/using-pop-culture-to-hook-students-on-poetry/tgardner/

Song lyrics, commercial jingles, and Dr. Seuss all play a role in Traci Gardner’s plan to entice students into loving poetry.

Andrea Lunsford/Jeanne Law Bohannon, Multimodal Mondays: Day in the Life: A DIY Assignment Using Immediate Media, Archives, and Animation to Engage Student-Scholars in Digital, Public Writing

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/uncategorized/multimodal-mondays-day-in-the-life-a-diy-assignment-using-immediate-media-archives-and-animation-to-engage-student-scholars-in-digital-public-writing/alunsford/

An explanation of how Twitter, Storify, and Go Animate bring digital learning and literacy to the classroom.

Traci Gardner, A List of Ten Inspired by Literary Starbucks

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/assignment-idea-2/a-list-of-ten-inspired-by-literary-starbucks/tgardner/

Traci Gardner uses Literary Starbucks as a model, creating an assignment that allows students to playfully explore the minds and characters of great literary figures.

Michael Michaud, Writing is a Public Act: Take One

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/authors-2/michael-michaud/writing-is-a-public-act-take-one/archived/

In this exploration of how the private writing of the college classroom differs from the public writing of the internet, Michael Michaud discusses his efforts to bring student writing into the public sphere and generate discussion about the impact that writing can have.

Andrea Lunsford, Writing to Make Something Happen in the World

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/authors-2/andrea-lunsford/writing-to-make-something-happen-in-the-world/alunsford/

Andrea Lunsford discusses “good writing” in the context of words that serve a performative – even a transformative – purpose in the world, sharing and causing waves of social justice and change.

As a member of my university’s faculty development committee, I’ve found myself in charge of a workshop on this very topic: getting students to engage with the reading. Given that’s it’s time for a new semester, I thought it might be useful to share a list of activities to use in the classroom to help foster thoughtful engagement with the text itself. Some of these are things I’ve written about before, some are ideas from other people that I’ve found helpful.

In-class discussion questions

Everyone approaches classroom discussion differently, and every class dynamic requires some different approaches to the way we present the questions to the students.

• I’m a frequent user of small groups in my classrooms, and I’ve developed a number of ways to get the groups working on ideas. This particular exercise is one that encourages students to consider their own answers — but then to also evaluate the quality of other people’s answers.
• This semester I tried something new with students who were reluctant to jump into full-class discussions. I projected 4-5 discussion questions (usually culled from the instructor’s manual to the textbook) and gave students the first 5-10 minutes of class to find information that would help answer those questions. I wish I could tell you where I ran across this idea, but it worked wonders with a class that was reluctant to join in discussions.
• I’ve long used student-generated discussion questions in my upper division classes.
• This guest post by Ben Bunting has some nice ideas about literature and contexts as discussion openers.

Writing as Discussion

Many of my courses are writing intensive courses, so I try to integrate written analysis of the literature into classroom participation.

• I’ve found success with having students write analytical paragraphs as part of their approach to the texts, which can work in any classroom where analyzing information is central.
• Barclay Barrios suggests having students write argument haikus about complex informational texts, which could certainly be translated into discussion-openers in a literature classroom. I will be doing this next semester, most assuredly. (Barrios has also suggested a way to do this with Vine.

In class reading

Actually having students read in the classroom can be useful, particularly early in the semester when they’re just figuring out how to do the work of the literature classroom.

• Critical Reading , as exemplified here, is a technique I picked up from the Foundation for Critical Thinking. It can be useful when students are approaching a really challenging work. It helps students recognize the need to slow down as they read, and can build confidence in the idea that they can actually do the difficult reading.
• I also like to have students make use of contexts sections in anthologies.
• Having students view characters through the eyes of other characters in the text can be a useful way to understand character motivation.

Multi-modal approaches

Encouraging students to have fun with the literature, while still looking carefully into the text itself can be a useful way to engage students who are not English majors.

• I recently had students create comics about Charles Dickens.
• In teaching “The Things They Carried,” I’ve had students create categories of the items in the book — and I think this is something that could be adapted for a wide variety of stories and poems.
• Barclay Barrios has written both about drawing the argument (which I’ve adapted as drawing the poem)

The aural nature of literature

And finally, literature — especially poetry — should be approached through the aural experience.

• Joanne Diaz has students perform Shakespeare’s sonnets as slam poems, which encourages the students to consider the varying patterns of the poems.
• Joanne Diaz also has her students use the Woodberry Poetry Room to teach students about active listening.

I think that all of these are adaptable for different levels and for different texts, which is generally how most of my teaching goes: I see what others are doing, and I adapt it to what works with my particular groups of students. I’m looking forward to another semester of teaching — and I certainly plan to adapt some of these activities in new ways for my classrooms.

This year, in teaching my Shakespeare course, I used the 450th birthday as an excuse to get students to bring Shakespeare awareness to campus. To that end, I created an assignment that I called “Pop-up Shakespeare,” which I described like this:

You will be developing some sort of experience for your fellow Heidelberg students, whether it’s through chalking Shakespearean sonnets onto the sidewalks, developing a Shakespeare film festival, performing flash mob scenes, or creating a Shakespeare-related volunteer project (just to suggest some ideas). For this assignment you can work with a group or alone. You must document the event through pictures; you will also write a brief analysis of your work, explaining why you chose to do what you did.

The object of the assignment was to encourage students to have some fun with Shakespeare and to exercise some creativity in doing so. It was ultimately a small part of the final grade, but I wanted something that would make Shakespeare just a bit less intimidating and would make literature a bit more visible on campus.

The results were fun — and I heard from a number of colleagues in other departments how much they were enjoying the different things that students were posting around campus. We had some sidewalk chalk, we had a movie night in one of the residence halls, and mostly we had a lot of great signs.

By way of example, let’s take the fad of six word stories and essays.  I’m generally not a fan. Especially not of the possibly apocryphal Hemingway version: “For Sale. Baby Shoes. Never Worn.”  Supposedly Hemingway said this is all the story you need to tell.  But I suspect one of my finest teaching moments may have been when I said to a totally-disturbed class: that story is only interesting if that baby has no feet.

Listen, I get it.  It’s heartbreaking; that story can make me cry, because anything suggesting the mortality of babies can make me cry.  But a reliance on abstract emotional manipulation is not the same thing as great storytelling.  Which is not to say a six word story couldn’t be great.  Because herein lies the difference between form and formula.  Form forces a writer to rise above restrictions to reach originality; formula allows a writer to rely on restrictions to be relieved of the burden of originality.  Formula works on some readers, of course (including me: hello, Sophie Kinsella, I love you), but it isn’t what anybody enters an MFA program aspiring to, so my class is going to set all kinds of rules, just to show how well writers can surprise readers when we follow them.

My first response? I genuinely don’t know. Not all of my students do things that are out of the ordinary, but sometimes they really do put together presentations that challenge themselves and challenge conventional ways of presenting interpretations of literature.  The best examples from this semester were in my post-1798 survey of British Literature course.  One group, after presenting a bit of background on the work of Lewis Carroll, acted out “The Jabberwocky.”  Another group turned the epistolary juvenalia of Jane Austen’s “Lady Susan” into a play, based on everyone texting each other and using hashtags to indicate themes.

Not everyone, of course, does such things. I had plenty of student presentations that stuck to a fairly standard formula of background information, overview of the text, then interpretation of the text. These are fine. They do the work of the assignment.  And for the most part, even though they weren’t quite as exciting as watching a student use a toy lightsaber as the vorpal sword to slay the jabberwocky, they made good use of visual aids and were thoughtful in their commentary. (I suppose it helps that I have a list of pretty specific expectations for what not to do with PowerPoint — most importantly, I insist that students cannot just read from the slides.)

But to get back to that question: How do I get students to be creative? How do I get them, ultimately, to have fun with what they’re doing?

I don’t have a complete answer for those questions, but I think that there are some ways that we can foster creativity in our classrooms and encourage our students to not take themselves too seriously, even as we take the study of literature (or any subject, really) seriously.

The first is that I do not take myself particularly seriously, even though I consider literary analysis to be serious work. Some of this has to do with teaching students about audience — and making sure that students begin to recognize the difference between the (relatively) casual conversation about the text in the classroom and the more formal analysis of the text in their written work.

But it really isn’t about me.  It’s really about getting students to engage with the texts in front of them, and getting them to work on the texts in a variety of ways. I’ve written before about my own adherence to multimodal methods in the classroom, and I think that this helps foster that creativity.  We draw things in my classroom.  We write group paragraphs that analyze quotations in class.  We use analogies to explain major concepts. We do dramatic readings of the literature. Most importantly, and what takes up a lot of my prep time, is the fact that I try to only use each technique once or twice — so whenever we’re doing some sort of group work, it’s different from the  activity that we’ve done before. This is especially true in my 100- and 200-level literature courses, where I’m trying to teach students about the many different ways that we can talk and think about literature.

It does, unfortunately, take time to foster this creativity — many of my most creative projects this semester came from students who have taken multiple classes with me, and so know that my classroom is a fairly safe space to try something new and weird. The study of literature is all about ambiguity and the many ways that we can consider a work — and once students become comfortable with that idea, their creativity can really shine through.

But in my late adoption of it, I’ve come to realize how useful it can be in the classroom, particularly when it comes to facilitating a lot of the work that I do to create a student-centered discussion.

I realized over the summer that I could use Google Drive for a couple of things. The first was to create journal templates for my students in my 100- and 200-level courses.  In those courses, my students keep daily reading journals — and by having students write in a journal that I can see, I can immediately tell who is doing the work. More importantly, I can draw ideas into the classroom that students write about in their journals. It took some work to set everything up (I created a template, then made copies for all of the students), but it’s been a useful way to keep an eye on what interests the students in what they read.

My other major use of Google Drive is to create what are essentially collaborative documents of discussion questions.  I did this initially because I’ve got an assignment that’s always been a bit clunky for me in terms of organization. In my 300- and 400-level courses, I’ve always taught students how to write open-ended discussion questions, and then I’ve had them submit questions daily (in lieu of a quiz).  We use those questions in class to guide our conversation.

Previously, I’ve tried having the students just hand the questions to me in class (which really made me work on the fly) or email me either the night before or the hour before class.  With the email, I wound up spend a lot of time collating the work, which also meant the potential for missing some of the questions in the overflowing email inbox.  As I was preparing for my courses over the summer, I remembered an admonition from my student teaching days — if you can let the students do the work for you, have them do the work for you.  Thus, for this, I’ve got the students in my upper division courses writing and collating their discussion questions in Google docs. Here, I simply created forms for each day of class — titled with the name of the text we’re reading and the assigned chapters of acts — and shared an entire folder with the class.  Students submit questions until 30 minutes before class — then I print the entire thing off and use it as we work through the literature. I’ve found that students’ questions are less repetitive when they see what’s been asked before — and I’m even noticing that students will sometimes reference other students’ questions in their own (in which case, I know we have to discuss a certain topic).

I went into the semester thinking that this would be all we use shared documents for.

Then I decided that the students in my novels course really needed to take a careful look at the chronology of events in Dracula.  I realized that this was not something we could really just do on the blackboard. We’ve been doing chapter-by-chapter breakdowns of plots at the beginning of class, but there are simply too many days and too many different narrators in Dracula for that to be effective.

So I created a shared document that simply lists all of the dates in Dracula when a character writes in a diary, sends a letter, or receives a message from a solicitor’s office. On the first day of class, I shared it with all of the students in the class, projected it from the overhead, and set students to the task of sorting things out.  Students worked in groups of two or three, huddled (admittedly) around their phones, laptops, tablets, and the classroom computer, adding to the chronology together.

Once we spend the first chunk of class doing that, we take a look at the story in order — and it’s really helped the students find the details of Dracula’s movements (“Oh, wait! That’s what the dog on the ship was!” “Oh, that’s why there was the detail about the escaped wolf!”).  I also color code the document, according to the different characters narrating (i.e. John Seward’s diary is in green, Mina Murray/Harker’s journal is in purple), which allows us to see how the narrative bounces from one character to another, and how the characters themselves have to piece information together over time.

In doing this we’ve been able to have an effective discussion of the structure of the novel, which has shown the students that they can, indeed, break down the narrative into its parts and look inside the inner workings of the novel.

On this particular day, my students read “The Story of Little Dombey” and “Sikes and Nancy,” which are Dickens’ own adaptations of his work for his public speaking tour — essentially, they are selections from two novels that he performed for his audience, giving only the central parts of these two particular episodes.

So, to prep my students, I showed them a few examples from Hark, a vagrant. If you’re unfamiliar with it, the artist takes literature and history as a subject matter for 6 or 9 paneled comics.  They’re funny, they’re spot on, and they can show students how it’s important — even in making jokes — that we have something to hang on to from the literature. (My favorite is “Dude Watching With the Brontes”.)  For me it established a tone for the class — we’re serious here in our study of literature, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. This is supposed to be fun — but reflective of the text in front of us.

From here, I provided groups of three a sheet with six panels on it, and had students select one of the two stories. The directions from this point on were to pick the 6 most important moments, and illustrate them as best as they could. This work got students talking about the plots, and particularly identifying the plots that didn’t quite work out of the context of their respective novels. But they also talked a great deal about the central themes of the stories.

What the students came up with was amazing. In general, students approached the topic differently. We had lol-speak. We had serious attempts at illustrating the important moments. We had references to contemporary pop-culture — and one group even explained that the last moment of “Sikes and Nancy” would be saved for the post-credit sequence.

After students worked on their comics, I had the groups explain their choices, which allowed us to look at what they saw as not only central moments in the stories, but also the themes of the stories. What was remarkable about the effort was that students gravitated towards similar moments in the two stories. For example, the groups that chose “Little Dombey” all focused on the little boy’s complaint that money (his father’s highest concern) could not bring back his dead mother.

In all, the students were able to sort out the plot, the characters, the themes without my intervention — and that goal is certainly a huge part of working on their ability to read literature.

Besides screenwriting, the internet has enhanced the practicality of another field—radio drama.  The format, which dwindled in the U.S. with the rise of television, is now reemerging under the aegis of podcasting and audiobooks.  Teachers of dramatic writing are wise to embrace audio theatre for the following reasons:

1. It stands to become more and more important in our Internet Age.
2. It provides easy production opportunities for emerging writers—requiring no sets, costumes, or even line memorization, as required by film and the stage.
3. Digital recordings, the product of audio theatre endeavors, are easy to disseminate to a wide audience.

My university, Arkansas Tech, has been leading the way in audio theatre ventures for seven years now.  Through an organization called the Arkansas Radio Theatre, we have created more than forty broadcasts which play on the local radio station, are made available to the visually impaired throughout the state, and are available on-line  (click Public, then Radio Theatre).  The Arkansas Radio Theatre is dedicated to new plays and adaptations of classic literature.  An audio theatre company like the Arkansas Radio Theatre is easy to establish because free recording software is easily available.  An interested instructor simply needs some microphones in order to record voices.  Apart from that, an audio theatre company simply requires a means for broadcast—or some server space, which is readily available at most universities.

However, just because a production opportunity exists, that does not mean that student writers are prepared to take advantage of it.  Because audio theatre is a unique form, writers must be trained with relevant coursework.  In order to build the Radio Theatre into the curricular structures of my university, I am teaching (in Fall 2014) an upper-division topics course focusing on Radio Theatre Writing.  Some of the assignments explore audio theatre as a genre:  for example, listening to broadcasts from the Golden Age of Radio and comparing them to the audio drama available today.  Students will eventually work toward hour-long original scripts.  Hopefully, the insights learned in teaching this class will help others who attempt to engage in audio theatre projects.  I will report on the progress of the course in later posts.

In class, I use a sequence of out-loud group storytelling exercises. By emphasizing quickness and collaboration, these exercises urge students to see plot as a skill to be practiced, rather than as a unique art object to be labored over. By working quickly, students learn that plot can be generated without unnecessary headaches. And by attending carefully to what comes before and trying to adapt to the developing plot, students work toward what Aristotle would call a “unity of action.”

Here’s how the exercises work:

• STEP ONE. The class tells a story one word at a time, going around the room two or three times. This step serves largely as a warm-up, but it also demonstrates that plot balances individuality and utility — sometimes a student is lucky enough to get a noun or verb; other times, an article or preposition is required. This step can be repeated until students are comfortable.

• STEP TWO. The class tells a story with each student saying five words at a time. After a few runs, you should urge the class to build the story to a logical end. You can encourage a stronger ending by identifying the last student in advance and telling him or her that his or her last two words must be “The End.”

• STEP THREE. Five members of the class sit in chairs at the front of the room and tell a story in twenty-second increments. Give each chair a label, such as “set-up,” “inciting incident,” “escalating conflict,” “climax,” and “dénouement.” After the students understand their functions, they tell a story. I count aloud quietly for each student’s twenty-second turn. After the first story, students can switch positions to try new functions; they should repeat the exercise until some measure of success is achieved.

Interspersed with the individual stories, you can make comments and lead brief discussions. For example, early on, the story often “de-rails.” You can ask the class why this happened and how the story might be fixed. You can also make minimal side comments while the exercise is in progress, such as, “Just say anything,” or “Let’s bring the story to an end.”

These exercises help to demystify dramatic structure and give students experience using their “plotting muscles.” Of course, this series works best in a class where students are comfortable with each other and feel free to express themselves. It is ideal if some exercises in improvisation have occurred earlier in the semester.

How do you teach plot in the classroom?