class meetings on secondary readings

Back in February, KF posted this question to Palimpest: "How do you get your students to engage actively with a small piece of a long text before they've read the whole thing?"

I have the opposite question, I suppose: When you've assigned 2 or 3 articles of secondary reading for one class meeting, how do you provoke, manage, promote, (what-have-you) class discussion?

In my course on "Histories of Writing, Reading, and Publishing," we're reading a good many secondary articles here at the beginning of the course (like Darnton and Feather). Discussion is going pretty well, but I feel like we're perhaps moving a bit too quickly through the material and that we might not be doing it justice.

One way I try to frame discussion is through some basic questions:

• What are the main points of this essay?
• What are its strengths and weaknesses?
• How does it differ from / disagree with other material we've read?
• How does it apply to the issues we are considering?

So what do you do?

[Cross-posted on my blog.]

Comments

[meg]

I sometimes get them to critique the writing of the piece, as a way of limbering up, essentially. Did the writer make hir point clearly? What would you have done differently? Five minutes and they've abandoned form for content, usually.

[KF]

One thing I often do, on a day when I've got two (or more, but usually only two) essays under consideration, is have the class spend about 20 minutes in small groups discussing the essays, and tell each group that they need to come back with, for instance, a quote from each essay that demonstrates their connection or their basic disagreement on whatever the issue is, and a persuasive close reading of the quotes that makes the connection for the class. Sometimes I'll also ask them to come back with a question about the essays that has been raised by their group's discussion. After the time in small groups, I go around, have each group report back, and then frame questions for further discussion based on their responses.