The Work of the Class

When I started my MA Program, the work we were assigned in our seminars was mostly structured like this: read a lot of primary texts and critical articles; lead the seminar once; write a big seminar paper at the end. If we got feedback on our work, it was mostly confined to comments on the final paper that were returned to us with our grade. For the semester. In retrospect, I suppose that an ambitious student might have used those comments to revise their work to submit to a journal, but this wasn’t suggested or even implied.

Though some faculty develop all kinds of creative assignments for their seminars, this structure is still typical of many graduate classes in English. And I suppose this is fine if students already know everything, but that was not the case for me, and I know it is not the case for many others. Most people pursue an MA in English because they love the subject matter and want to learn.  And in my experience, classes can be structured to allow learning to happen.

Fortunately, I took two classes as a graduate student, one in the second year of my MA program and the other when I was getting my PhD, that were structured very differently. The work of these courses—both research methods classes—revolved around specific tasks that the professors wanted us to learn through practice. We wrote frequently, and the assignments were returned to us promptly with terse and useful comments. Short assignments built upon one another and led to longer assignments.  If the work was graded, work later in the semester was weighted far more heavily than work at the beginning had been.  For me, these classes allowed me learn by doing, to progress quickly, and to experience scholarship as a recursive and evolving process that can be taught—and learned.

If you’ve read through the syllabus for our class, you’ll notice a few elements that I’ve cribbed from these professors.  Frequent short writing assignments allow you to practice communicating your ideas in writing and to allow me to give you frequent and rapid feedback. If you want to revise your work, you may. You will always have had the opportunity to practice a task you will be graded on—that’s where the minilessons come in. Big projects come later in the semester and build on work you have already done.

The structure of this class reflects two parts of my teaching philosophy: most students are capable of doing excellent work and it’s unreasonable to expect excellent work without allowing students an opportunity to practice, to take risks, to make mistakes, and to be evaluated on their most successful work instead of punished for not having already known everything on day one.

Obviously, we have an ideal situation for this kind of structure: motivated and mature students, freedom to design (and revise!) classes and assignments, an institutional position that allows me to experiment without fear of getting fired. I’ll explore structural challenges to this kind of teaching philosophy in other posts; for now it’s worth thinking about the ways in which course design communicates beliefs about teaching and students—and considering how we might shape our classes to reflect the philosophies we hold.

Jumping In for the Long Haul

 Unlike a 45, 50, or even an 80-minute introductory class, the first meeting of a weekly seminar poses special challenges.  For one thing, dispensing with preliminaries is nearly impossible.  In a class that meets frequently, I know I will be seeing students in a day or two. I can send them out with a reading assignment for the next class that includes the syllabus and avoid the deadly ritual of going through the syllabus for the course together during the first class. And in a setting like UMass Boston, there is often enough change in personnel between the first and second classes that I’ve found it to be far more efficient to hand out the syllabus on the first day, but wait to talk about course assignments and expectations until the second—or even the third—class meeting when the roster has stabilized.

But in a three-hour seminar that meets weekly, there isn’t much of a choice; we have to talk about the syllabus on the first day—students need to have a sense for what they are getting into while they still have a chance to get out. I’ve started sending out the syllabus prior to the first class, so we aren’t looking at something completely new; nevertheless, the activity of going through the syllabus inevitably elicits questions from the braver students in the class that may be shared by the quieter students. If nothing else, going over the syllabus lets me talk a bit about my philosophies of teaching, learning, and responding to student work (including grades!) that I think students must understand before they sign on to a class.

But each class meeting is precious in a weekly seminar—so what other priorities are there? In a workshop-style class, where students will actively share their work with one another, it’s important to me to establish a sense that the classroom is an active space where it is safe to experiment and okay to fail.  Teaching engages me because it is always new; always improvisational. If students are actively engaged, they will surprise you with new insights. You will learn together. And to quote the title of Peter Filene’s book, that’s the joy of teaching. At least for me.

So how did we try to establish this kind of environment right away? As I mentioned in class, the last time I taught this course, we had snow days each week on the night our class met.  By the time we finally shared a classroom, the students and I had been corresponding, posting work on the class blog, and responding to one another’s posts for nearly a month. We never really had a first class.   We started in the usual way of the graduate seminar, with introductions, which I personally hate but that are something we have to learn to do in the academy. But last night I did something I had never done before: As you were introducing themselves I wrote your names on the board. And, surprise, you all used one another’s names! Why have I never thought of this before? Probably because no one ever did this in any of the graduate seminars I took as a student. I have the roster in front of me, and last night I learned that it made a difference for you to have the roster in front of you, as well.  Teaching is learning, even after many years of practice!!

The Cold Open

Last night we met for the first time—and as I always do before a first class meeting, I thought about how to generate an active classroom from the beginning, even before we really know one another. In my undergraduate classes, I always jump right in to work on the first day, whether that means having students turn their desks to the wall and asking them to copy the university’s plagiarism policy longhand before asking them to read “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” or digging in to the language of the Fugitive Slave Act before sending them off to begin Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

These classes are a little bit like the “cold open” sketches that jump-start Saturday Night Live, throwing us right into the show before the credits, before the band starts playing, before we meet the evening’s host.   I’m not sure what the SNL writers want that cold open to do, except perhaps to keep us watching in the hopes that there will be another sketch worth staying up for as the late night progresses. And certainly I hope that a strong opening will engage students enough so that they’ll be willing first to open their assigned reading—and that when they do, they’ll begin to make the kinds of connections between our opening activity and the reading that will help them engage with the unfamiliar prose styles they will confront in these texts (or at least, have enough patience with Melville’s or Stowe’s particular nineteenth-century styles that they begin to feel familiar instead of alienating).

I imagine that for the cold open writers, some weeks are easier than others simply because the content is better—and this is certainly true when I think about the opening day in a literature classroom. It’s fun to find an angle on the material that will maximize engagement within the time constraints of the opener—5 minutes or so on SNL, maybe 50 minutes for me. They need to keep the viewers watching; we need to get them thinking. But in either case, losing the preliminaries and jumping into the material, especially experientially, can help foster the engagement we want to build.

So how did our cold open work? Initially I had planned to have you freewrite about a really memorable teacher, and we still may do that exercise at some point. But I wanted to begin with the work of the class, and that meant digging into a literary text right away. So it was time for a new plan. As class approached. I decided to test out a series of class activities outlined in The Literature Workshop by Sheridan D. Blau (my hero!).  These activities—silent reading, jump-in reading, pointing, free-writing, and discussing—had always struck me as aimed at a younger, less sophisticated audience than those I have in a graduate seminar, and as inappropriate for anything longer than a poem, and as best suited for an initial encounter with a text.  I had assigned a short story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” that I knew would be familiar (maybe too familiar) to many of you. But we jumped in anyway.

I was thrilled at how immediately you engaged with the activities we tried—a very good sign, I think, for your ability as teachers to experiment and go with a new idea instead of fighting it right away. And I loved your responses to the activities. Though some of you found it uncomfortable to share your writing with your peers, and others felt constrained to write in a way that sounded like a seminar paper, others of you noted that the activity allowed you to participate actively in a new group setting surprisingly quickly. It can be hard to be sure that all students are engaged, even in a small seminar—I felt that this sequence was almost magical in the way in which it got everyone talking with almost zero effort from me.  

But were we engaging with the text? I would say yes. You mentioned how hearing lines read expressively pointed you to new interpretations. Slowing down to listen to and talk through a (very) familiar text revealed new opportunities for close reading. Seeing different approaches to the same lines of text showed that our first approaches to writing about literature does not need to be polished or written from a distance. These initial responses can be personal, idiosyncratic, associative—they can even (quite usefully!) invoke the special pain of a sunny morning hangover. And it seemed to me last night that they can allow us to feel like a class already—even after just one night.

  

 

Welcome to English 611

Welcome to the course blog for English 611, The Teaching of Literature. This blog offers an online parallel to the class, where you can find assignments, links to online readings, and class information, as well as reflections on class discussions and readings. I look forward to sharing insights and information about teaching with you.