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)

This year, AWP (the Association of Writers & Writing Programs) is doing away with its pedagogy forums, a staple at its national conference for a number of years. An unfortunate effect of this decision is that there will be no more “pedagogy papers,” those one-page creative writing exercises written by instructors at all levels, from first-year grad students to full professors. Each year, AWP made available on its website a PDF file of thirty or so “Best of” papers, selected from all that got submitted.

No more.

If you’ve never perused these files, they’re worth a look. The papers cover all genres and are sure to spark ideas in the classroom. The good news is that the PDF files from past years are still available on AWP’s website. The bad news—actually, it’s just a bit inconvenient—is that you’ll have to hunt a little for them. On AWP’s main page, awpwriter.org, just type “pedagogy papers” (in quotes) into the search box. Each result takes you to a page where, with a little scrolling, you’ll find the PDF file labeled either “Exemplary Pedagogy Papers” or “Best of the Pedagogy Papers.” Download those files and you’ll be staring at several hundred useful, tested exercises for the creative writing classroom at all levels.

What do you think of the AWP’s cancellation of pedagogy forums?

Poetry: The “Weird News” poem. There are many sources of “weird news.” Simply Google “weird news,” and marvel at the results. The assignment is to find a recent news article that A) is weird, and B) the writer feels some connection to, and then to write a poem that builds on the article in some way. The poem should tap into the article’s deeper implications, or spin off in some entirely new direction—anything, really, as long as the poem goes beyond the facts presented in the article. The “weird news” poem can also be combined with a formal assignment, so that the student would be writing a “weird news” sonnet, sestina, etc.

One student of mine wrote a terrific poem based on the story of a Japanese clothing designer who, in response to increased street violence against women in Tokyo, created a woman’s dress that allowed the woman to disguise herself as a vending machine. If she were ever in a situation where she was being followed, she could simply pull up the dress and camouflage herself amid the urban landscape. The student’s poem explored the strangeness of protecting oneself by becoming a commodity, and in one stanza addressed the clothing designer directly. It was the sort of wonderfully idiosyncratic poem that the student wouldn’t have written in the absence of an assignment that had her looking beyond her own life and community.

Fiction: The “Advice Column” story. You’ll find them in many newspapers and, of course, online. What do all advice columns have in common? The letters people write are rooted in conflict, and not just any conflict: sticky, icky, urgent conflict, the kind that makes you glad it isn’t you in that person’s situation…which happens to be the exact sort of conflict we like in fiction. So the exercise (which works for students at all levels) is this: Find a letter written to an advice columnist, either in a newspaper or online, that you feel would make a good piece of fiction, and then write a story with that conflict at the center of the story. The advice columnist’s answer isn’t important. The question—the predicament—is the important part. Start with that core predicament, then fictionalize a story around it, coming up with original characters, setting, etc. Do that, and you’ll know that your story is rooted in conflict.

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.