As teachers of playwriting, we must realize that we and our students are part of a community of artists.  Whereas writers in other forms—poetry, for example—can imagine that they operate exclusively in a world of writers, playwrights have no such luxury.  Their work depends on a vast network of artists – actors, designers, stage hands, etc. – who are not primarily literary.  Whereas the decision makers for the printed genres (for example, editors of creative writing journals) can be presumed to have a literary background, decision makers for theatre (for example, artistic directors of professional theatres) may have found their way to the profession through any number of fields unrelated to writing.  For this reason, they do not always see playwriting as important.  It is up to us, then, to insist that it is.

Scott Walters points out that popular music does not rely on covers of past hits, nor does the motion picture industry confine itself to remakes.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that our most vibrant contemporary art forms—popular music, stand-up comedy, video, and, to a lesser degree, movies—are predicated on originality.  Of the arts, only classical music shares theatre’s obsession with re-creating works of the past.  In contrast, visual artists must create afresh, and poetry and fiction become mere book-making without original contributions from today’s writers.  Puzzlingly, theatre is an unwitting oddball in its preference for works of the past.

What we have today is a karaoke theatre, where contemporary artists recreate yesterday’s hits.  While karaoke is entertaining, no one thinks of it as high art because it lacks the ability to further the field.  No one looks to karaoke singers to define what art and culture will become.    Regrettably, theatre today is largely karaoke theatre and satisfied to remain that way.  It excludes the contributions of today’s writers; paradoxically, amending this exclusion could be the solution to many of contemporary theatre’s problems.

Playwriting teachers must be aware of the issues facing the theatre community and must be prepared to make cases like I have made.  If teachers do not advocate for playwriting, there will be no need for the playwrights that we train.

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.

What we’re really talking about, ultimately, is the aspect of performance for our audience. And that performative aspect is something that I’ve been thinking about in terms of my presence in the classroom: I perform differently on Twitter than I do in person; I perform differently around my friends than I do in the classroom; in fact, I perform differently in front of my colleagues than I do in front of my students.

This is not to say that the shifts in my personality are huge — the same basic “me” is there — but rather that I’ve recently become very conscious of that performance aspect of my teaching. In the classroom, my goal is to be approachable, but authoritative. I want my classroom to be a fairly laid-back space, where students are comfortable grappling with the complexities of the texts in front of them. I also want them to have fun with the literature, and this is where I’m most conscious of the way that I become performative — and, in fact, have become so increasingly over my years of experience.

What I’ve noticed in teaching over the past several years is that I’ve become much more conscious of the space that I take up in the classroom — particularly the way that I take up that space.  I’ve always been one to pace across the front of the room, or even move into the rows of students.  While this has the potential drawback of being distracting for some students, I also think it’s important for keeping students engaged and showing that I’m paying attention to them.

But that’s not quite what I’m talking about either.

What I’m really talking about is becoming, in some ways, much bigger, more physically expressive than I normally am in day-to-day conversation.

Perhaps the easiest way for me to explain this is to talk about what happens when I teach “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Students — particularly Intro to Lit students — don’t always quite visualize how very terrifying it is when the narrator is creeping about the smooch above the mopboard in that final section. What’s particularly frightening in that scene is when she looks over her shoulder at John and he faints. It always strikes me as a little bit like some scenes from The Grudge (a movie I’ve only seen trailers for, by the way), but I think that even just suggesting that to the students doesn’t quite do it. So, I show them where the mopboard would be, then I lean over — almost getting down on the ground — and begin creeping, turning my head abruptly back in to explain how terrifying this might be.

It’s very physical, and it’s something that I find that I do more and more as I teach. The performance usually doesn’t wind up being quite this undignified (it is probably a sight when I’m wearing high heels and doing this), but as I continue to teach I’ve found much more hand waving, much more exaggerated movement on my part. It’s not really the sage on the stage — most of the courses I teach are almost entirely discussion-driven — but it is an acknowledgement that we’re onstage when we’re teaching, no matter what.

It’s not a good habit, but it’s an understandable one, I think.  And I suspect that most of us give in to the temptation from time to time.

But last week, I was reminded once again why it is that I need to re-read for class – and not just because I need to be sure that I’m completely prepared.

I was preparing to teach “A Rose for Emily” (and Faulkner happens to be one of my favorite authors) – and it’s something that I’ve taught at least once a year since 2006.  So I’m pretty familiar with the story.  But I re-read it anyway.

Because we’re focusing on setting in my course right now, I tried to pay particular attention to the details of setting, as described by the narrators.  Many are the details  I’ve always paid attention to in class (Miss Emily’s house as “an eyesore among eyesores” and the dust and stagnant air throughout the story); but this time, one small detail jumped out at me at the very beginning of the story.

As the narrators describe Miss Emily, they say that she “had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery.”

The cedar-bemused cemetery.

What an extraordinary description – and one that I’ve probably read (and perhaps even noted) in the past.  But this time, I was reading a clean copy (we just switched editions, so my book has no annotations yet) – and so this simply struck me.

And that’s the point.  While it is important to re-read in order to prepare for class, it’s also important to re-read to simply recharge.  I know that I get caught up in the frustrations of the semester and the general exhaustions of life, but I also know that when it comes down to it, I actually love the stuff that we do in literary studies.  Cheesy? Sure.  But honest? Absolutely.

And that energy and enjoyment is infectious – and students will notice it.

Today’s guest blogger is Eric Selinger, Associate Professor of English at DePaul University, where he teaches courses on poetry, pedagogy, and popular culture.  He received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from UCLA, and is the author of

“A change of style,” says Wallace Stevens, “is a change of subject.”

I quote that line to students all the time because it sums up one of the keys to saying interesting things about almost any poem.  Teach this concept—really teach it, so that it becomes “truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole, / reflex action,” as Robert Hayden says—and you’ve given your students a powerful way to attend to any piece of writing.

As Stevens reminds us, whenever a poem’s mood or idea changes, so will its style, with some kind of shift, no matter how slight, in its rhythm, diction, phrasing, sound, or ratio of sentence to line.  By extension, anywhere you spot a change of style, you’ve spotted a shift in substance, even if the ideas seem, at first glance, the same.

To introduce this reading strategy, I like to use Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B.”  The poem’s scenario is familiar, and spelled out clearly enough to be accessible even to wary readers:

The instructor said,

Go home and write

a page tonight.

And let that page come out of you—

Then, it will be true.

There’s something ham-fisted, even condescending, about the assignment, and Hughes lets you hear that in the instructor’s short-lined, simplistically rhyming, clumsily metrical style.

“I wonder if it’s that simple?” the poem’s speaker responds, and each of the three responses he then gives has its own distinctive style.  First comes a pre-writing thought experiment marked by unmistakably “simple” grammar and ideas.  (That’s the “I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem” stanza.)  Then there’s the first piece of actual writing, which is jazzier and more complex in idea and sentence structure.  (“It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me / at twenty-two, my age,” that stanza begins.)  Another question (“Me—who?”) prompts an answer that returns to simple sentence structure, but with a new key verb:

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.

I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.

I like a pipe for a Christmas present,

or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.

In other words, what’s “true” isn’t what I am by race or age or geography, but what I like, and like to do—a different subject, captured in a slightly different style.

To answer the poem’s final question, “So will my page be colored that I write?” Hughes’s speaker picks up and echoes the instructor’s rhyme-words (“write” and “you” and “true”), even as his conclusion refuses the pat, complacent quality of the initial assignment.  It’s as though he needs to pitch things simply, using the instructor’s words, to reach his none-too-savvy audience.  That’s a handy lesson in rhetorical analysis and performance—and it gives you a way to connect your own lesson in style and substance to things that your students have already heard in composition classes, their own sections (in effect) of English B.

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.

One of the things that humanizes the classroom is storytelling. In their reviews of my teaching, my students have often mentioned that our drama classes were enlivened by some of the stories I told of my own experiences in the theater seeing plays. That surprised me, but on reflection I realize they were right.

For example, when I taught John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea I told my students about the first time I saw the play. It was 1957 in tiny Theater East when the Abbey Theatre brought its company to the United States for the first time since the war. Siobhan McKenna played Maurya.

I was brought there with a group from my undergraduate class, taught by the late David Krause, who was an Irish Studies expert and my drama teacher. I had no idea what to expect. We had not read the play in advance. It followed the performance of Synge’s one-act In the Shadow of the Glen and seemed to us a riveting drama.

But another drama intensified the experience for me. In the last moments of the play one of the actresses came onstage with her apron filled with glass milk bottles – Bartley’s body had been brought in and laid out and the women came in to mourn. The actress dropped her apron and the bottles broke on the floor. Everyone was barefoot, yet as the actresses came into the scene none looked down. Most of the glass was broomed into a pan. They walked across the remaining glass and seemed unhurt and unaware. At that moment they kneeled and began keening in what can only be described to someone who has not heard it as an unearthly wail of loss, pain, and sadness.

Amazingly, no one was hurt. The keening stopped when the play ended. There was total silence in the theater. The lights went down, the actors left the stage, the lights went up again and finally when the actors returned the audience—141 souls—broke into incredible applause.  Everyone knew this was a completely unforgettable experience in the theatre.

Have you had a similar experience? Have your students? How do you discuss performance and use storytelling in your classroom?

Because “theatricality” is inconceivable apart from action—apart from the act of doing that constitutes performance—the teaching of playwriting requires performance as part of classroom activities. The concept of performance as pre-eminent should undergird all course structures. For example, when possible, written assignments should be shared aloud in class: hearing texts with an audience is preferable to at-home silent reading because the former better approximates how scripts are meant to be experienced.

Dramatic writers must learn to see themselves as performers. They do not need to be good performers, but they need to be willing. They need to be able to play roles well enough that they can hear in their minds the characters’ voices as they commit words to paper. It is not the same skill as that of the actor, who hears primarily one voice at a time, but is more like that of the stage director who understands the interplay of multiple voices. Most playwrights, I believe, mutter to themselves. And, while a little murmuring is probably common to all creative writers, I would guess that playwrights spend an inordinate amount of time muttering speeches and singing songs to themselves. This skill—necessary as a “trying out” of characters—can be nurtured in students by having them perform.

To teach theatricality at its most basic, I suggest “The Play without Words” exercise, which I do with beginning playwrights at the start of each semester. For this exercise, students write a one-page play with a plot, in which no one speaks. Students must convey that plot through performance, using only materials readily available—the classroom, items from home, and three random classmates. This challenging exercise goes a long way toward illuminating both the limitations and benefits of the stage.  Students typically try to do too much:  for example, one young woman once tried to show a couple saying their last loving good-byes before they jumped from a collapsing World Trade Center. While interesting, the premise is inscrutable without additional trappings—words or set—as explanation.  On the other hand, students have learned how marvelously engaging it is to have a swordfight or an actor pretending to be an animal:  these actions seem hokey on the page, but are magic in performance. By having students perform early on, they internalize the “theatricality” that separates playwriting from the other genres, thereby laying the groundwork to become better dramatists.

How do you get student writers to incorporate theatricality in their dramatic works? How much does performance figure into your teaching? What are your favorite classroom exercises?

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.