Knowing Your Audience, or, Teaching to the Whole Class

Apart from graduate seminars (and sometimes even in graduate seminars), we’ll all encounter classes of students whose experiences in, abilities for and inclinations toward working closely with literature vary widely—sometimes wildly. In a diverse public university setting, where students can’t always march along taking classes in order from one level to the next, the range can be especially pronounced. 

Here’s an example. I often teach an undergraduate literature class on the 200 (nominally, second-year) level that both serves as one of three required prerequisite classes for English majors and fulfills a university distribution requirement.  This combination means that the class attracts a range of majors (and potential majors) from across the university, all of whom have an interest in fulfilling a requirement, and perhaps some of whom register for the class because they are interested in American literature. Perhaps.

But because of the nature of our campus, and especially because we have a large number of transfer students, the English department decided that students could take advanced classes in the major after having taken two of the three required prerequisites.  So every roster will  contain at least one or two advanced English majors for whom this is the last class they must take in order to graduate.

How do we teach such a range of students to read, discuss, and write about literary texts? How do we maintain interest among the dedicated and skilled English majors without alienating the students for whom the material is unfamiliar?  The best approach to this that I’ve found is to see the range as an opportunity rather than as a problem.

First, some general principles. Set a bar high enough so that everyone will be engaged in working hard right away, even the most experienced students. Begin with (or stick with) frequent low-stakes writing assignments so that the bright but inexperienced students can learn the ways of the discipline without being penalized at the beginning. Give students the opportunity to revise graded work, so that they have more control over the outcome of the semester. Frequently change the way class meetings work—rearrange seating, incorporate movement, ask students to read aloud, vary group sizes and members—in order to engage as many learning styles as possible. 

Finally, while it might be convenient in a short essay to divide the students into groups, in reality each student is an individual with unique experience and interest in the material.  For me, this underscores the necessity of taking the time to get to know them individually over the course of the semester.  When I taught composition, I would routinely cancel class in favor of individual conferences for each major paper assignment; why would these individual meetings matter less in a literature class? 

Individual conferences make a difference to all students—the struggling student who reveals a personal or family difficulty that is making it difficult to study; the middling student who labored with an undiagnosed learning disability and still lacks confidence; the advanced student who wants to think about graduate school but hasn’t found a way to put a meeting with a faculty member on her calendar.  But they also make a difference to our own engagement with our students as people. If I had not required student conferences, I never would have known that one of my students drove the Zamboni in the hockey rink for his work-study job—or that his dad, a Zamboni driver by trade, harbored a passion for Willa Cather. I never would have known that one of my brightest students had been a semi-successful touring rock musician but now was finding himself drawn to, of all things, reading and writing.  And I never would have heard one of my very best students of all time tell me about how, as an African American girl growing up in the deep South, she had been labeled “ineducable” and trained as a domestic servant.

Knowing my students, even a little bit, makes me a better teacher of literature, not just because I can cater to their interests, but because I can understand what literature means for them—that it really IS meaningful. That can be hard to see from the front of the classroom. But in a climate where it feels like few people care about our subject, it’s worth letting our students remind us how much it matters to them.