palimpsest

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.]

"Advanced College Writing"? Any suggestions?

George suggested that I cross-post this here.

Next semester, I'm scheduled to teach a 3000-level course called "Advanced College Writing." I've checked the catalog for the description, which is predictably vague. I've asked a few people who have taught it, and I've gotten some old syllabi. Some people run it like Comp III (there are normally only two sections of composition). Some people run it as a class in creative non-fiction. Some people run it as "academic writing."

Here's my thinking so far:

1) To my mind, "academic writing" is what Composition ought to be about. That's the way I run my composition classes--as an introduction to writing the kinds of essays that will be expected of students throughout their college careers. My students write academic prose, deal exclusively in writing arguments, and learn how to use the library to conduct research using academic databases. So I don't want to simply teach another comp class.

2) We already offer a creative non-fiction class, and I believe that if students want to learn how to write creative non-fiction, or if they want to write personal essays in a formal workshop setting, they'll take a class about it. There's no need, then, to ram it down their throats.

3) While Introduction to Literature provides the beginnings of instruction on how to write essays about literature, it is really a class about putting students in a room with some literature and having them shake hands, and then occasionally having them write essays.

So... at the moment, here's what I'm thinking: I'll make the class about writing for English majors. That is, it will be a writing class where prospective/current English majors can learn how to write the kinds of essays that will be expected of them in their upper-division English courses (this is a 3000 level class). I don't _think_ that students ever get any real instruction on how to write an English major-y essay in their 3000 and 4000 level courses, and so a workshop course in this kind of thing could be beneficial to them.

Here are the assignments and texts I'm considering at the moment:

--Two novels, one old (undecided) and one new (currently, Yann Martel's Life of Pi
--Perhaps a copy of The Best American Essays of 2003 (this is a problematic book, since it's really better suited to a creative non-fiction course)
--A cheap anthology of poetry
--Two major essays, ~6 and ~12 pages each, one at mid-term and one at the end.
--One 15-minute presentation (~6-8 pages) throughout the semester.
--I want to have them keep a Commonplace Book. I am resisting having them use the web for this, since I think there will be a value in having them write these quotations out by hand.
--Lots (~10) of short "position papers"--essentially brief arguments that force the students to write efficient prose. I am reluctant to use these because I absolutely find them painful to write, but I think they have pedagogic value at the undergraduate level.

I'm thinking that all essays wil be heavily workshopped, much more than the week or so they get in Freshman Comp for each assignment (comp is often about producing lots and lots of writing--at the expense of spending lots and lots of time on each essay). I'm also considering having them do a great deal of reading around in academic journals to get a sense of what it is academics write about and how they write. This would also allow them to get a sense of how much bad writing by academics is out there, and, hopefully, learn to hate such obfuscatory prose.

Any suggestions? I'm particularly interested in whether anyone can recommend a book about academic writing other than Altick's The Art of Literary Research. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

proposing a new course

I've learned from this announcement that the UMKC Center for Creative Studies is asking for applications by May 1 for curriculum development for interdisciplinary courses studying the creative process. You can read the application instructions for yourself. I'm thinking of proposing a course that would be taught by me and by a faculty member from the Art & Art History Department, but I'm not 100% sure what direction to take. A course that involved printmaking and/or bookmaking would be interesting, but I'm also tempted by the possibility of a course involving new media. There are faculty from A&AH engaged in both, so...

But what would a course "studying the creative process" and involving print or new media look like? This is just a blind post asking for suggestions for further reading and research. I have posted this to my own blog, as well.

Rethinking the survey

My officemate and I have applied for summer curriculum money to develop a website to support the second half of the British survey. This summer's work will serve, as the grant proposal somewhat pompously explains, as a proof-of-concept for a larger, department-wide curricular reconsideration of the surveys that will happen in the 2004-05 academic year.

So, I would be grateful to see syllabi from other folks' surveys--whether Brit Lit or not, the first half or the second (or any other division)--as well as to hear any ideas for rethinking a British or American lit survey. There's also a World Lit survey in the department, but since it rolls out in the fall, I doubt anyone strongly needs to reconceive it yet. In fact, the existence of the new survey is a partial motivation for next year's curricular revisions. (Other motives include demographic changes in the tenure-track faculty, a desire to think about the role of the survey course in general education, etc.)

Any ideas, suggestions, etc? (Obviously, I've snagged George's Brit Lit I syllabus! Also, this is the same post as this one on the Salt-Box.)

Perhaps the Dumbest Teaching Question Ever

[Cross-posted from Planned Obsolescence. What follows is less a request for teaching resources, per se, than a request for some advice. Pardon the slight veer off-topic.]

Here's something I probably ought to have thought of before the semester started, perhaps even before planning on teaching a class like The Big Novel: It's really, really hard to get students to talk actively about a text they've only read part of. They seem to want to hold all judgment in reserve until having completed the whole thing.

Or perhaps it's just hard to get my students to do such mid-text talking. Which would imply, of course, that the problem is located not in the texts, and not in the students, but in the professor.

So here's what's to my mind perhaps the dumbest teaching question ever, and certainly the dumbest one I've ever asked in a public place: How do you get your students to engage actively with a small piece of a long text before they've read the whole thing?

As a follow-up: How do you get them to perform such active engagement when the text under consideration consciously presents itself as a mystery of sorts, raising question after question and hinting that answers will eventually be found, which increases that tendency toward the deferral of judgment, even though you, who have read the book several times, know perfectly well that such answers, if they're to be found at all, aren't located at the text's end?

Wanted: Basic Introduction to Literary Research

Sorry to be so slow out of the gate here -- our semester is just kicking up this week, and so my brain has been (a) resisting contemplating teaching during a last mad week of attending to my own work, and (b) when deigning to think about teaching, much too focused on the putting out of local fires (such as creating syllabi).

I'm beginning to ponder my contributions here, though, and while I have some resources I'll share shortly, I'd like to begin with a query: I'd really like to find a good online resource that will introduce non-majors to literary research.

That is: I teach TONS of non-majors, and really don't want to have to spend class time every term going over how to search the MLA Bibliography and where other useful resources can be found. I also am tiring of receiving papers that use nothing but sources found on the web, many of them, shall we say, less than authoritative.

I could use a really good, very basic introduction to the process and form of literary research. Is there something out there? Or should this be something we build together?