Introduction to Literature

Creative Thinking, Analytical Writing, and Intuition

Franz Kafka (1883-1924), author of “A Hunger Artist.” Photo by Atelier Jacobi, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), author of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons

I had an epiphany while grading some Intro to Lit papers recently: Students do not trust their ability to make connections.

This is by no means an original observation. But while grading those papers – and thinking about this post – I finally understood my undergraduate advisor’s admonition that I needed to learn to trust my intuition more. I always took it to mean a distrust of reason, a distrust of analysis. And I was totally unfair to my advisor, because that’s not at all what she meant.

What she meant was that I wasn’t trusting myself when I saw connections. Continue reading “Creative Thinking, Analytical Writing, and Intuition”

On Re-reading for Class

I don’t know about anyone of you out there, but at a certain point in the semester I feel an exhausted relief when I look at the scheduled readings and see that I’ve been smart enough to assign texts that I’ve read before, that I’ve taught before. I have that moment when I think, “I don’t necessarily have to re-read this – I’ve done this before. I’ll just do what I did last time.”

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. Continue reading “On Re-reading for Class”

Groups of Three

Recently, I attended the International Conference on Critical Thinking and Education Reform in Berkeley, California. My primary purpose in attending the conference was to bring back ideas for my institution’s Critical Thinking Program, which I coordinate. But I also spent a good bit of time thinking about my own classroom, and particularly how I can better engage my students. As I process the various things that I learned at the conference, I will share some of them with you in this space. So this is just the first of what I hope to be several posts.

Unlike other academic conferences that I attend, this one is particularly oriented towards practical workshop exercises, where participants engage in some of the activities that might work in the classroom. One of my workshop leaders divided us up into groups of three, assigning each of us a role: questioner, answerer, and observer. We were then tasked with defining a major concept (in our session, they were concepts like education, schooling and leadership). The answerer had to define the term, the questioner then asked questions for clarification and precision, and the observer took notes and then explained back to the others in the workshop what had just occurred.

I’ve read about this sort of discussion technique, but I’ve never really been a part of it. I found it incredibly effective, particularly because I found myself having to clarify my own thinking on certain concepts. And so I’ve been thinking about ways that this might be productive for the literature classroom.

Continue reading “Groups of Three”

What’s the point?

For the final writing assignment in my Introduction to Literature course, I want students to think about the implications of what we’ve been doing all semester, to think about the larger picture of why literature is a part of our culture. To do this, I give them a list of six concepts we’ve been working with: love, war, identity, family, death, power, and the following question:

How do the ways that various literary texts define [concept X] suggest the role of literature in creating a broader (cultural) understanding of that concept?

This question works with any number of broader concepts or themes in a literature course: I simply choose those six because they’re the ones that we’ve focused on, and they’re the ones we focus on in our final reading, Hamlet.

I like to have the students think about this question because it allows them to do a number of things. First and foremost, it allows the students broad range in what they talk about. In their previous assignments, I’ve dictated which texts they can select and even limited the maximum number of texts they can write about – an attempt to encourage careful, close reading. For this assignment, I give students a minimum number of texts (three) to discuss, no maximum number, and free range over anything in the anthology. Doing this encourages students to explore their potential sources, cull the most relevant material, and develop an argument beyond summary. These are important skills in any academic paper. Continue reading “What’s the point?”

What Do You Envision?

Adapted from “Draw the Argument” by Barclay Barrios of Florida Atlantic University.

When I have my class read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” I begin discussion by telling the students to form groups of four and draw the poem together. Often, this is met with a bit of surprise and confusion; but eventually students sit together, read the poem, and draw a picture. Once the groups have finished, I ask one member of each group to re-create the picture on the board. We evaluate the pictures and then return to the poem for further discussion.

While this exercise may seem like a simplistic way to approach the poem, I think it’s a valuable way to bring students into the discussion – and to highlight their ability to actually interpret poetry – because:

Drawing the poem encourages students to re-read the poem. So often students read poems quickly and don’t spend time deciphering the imagery and the figurative language. If they don’t get it immediately, they give up. My students tell me that poetry is “too hard” and that they’re not good at “reading between the lines.” This exercise can disabuse students of that notion: While drawing, my students are able to make sense of much of the poem without my intervention. Continue reading “What Do You Envision?”