Draw Your Own Confusions: Cultivating Ambient Awareness in the Literature Classroom Literature Classroom (original) (raw)
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Screening for Meaning: Teaching Literature Online
Whether we ask them to analyze e-novels or simply Google a topic, we have been using hypertexts for some time as part of the way in which we teach our students the business of reading. The paths through which we navigate our screen worlds have been acknowledged as a means for demonstrating the reading process itself. The act of what is sometimes called "screening" tells us, through similarity and difference, a great deal about how we make connections between objects and ideas to generate interpretations and create meaning. It is at the intersection of reading as praxis and reading as hypertextuality that scholarly encounters with literature online can begin to accrue signification. The tools and approaches developed within the thriving field of Digital Humanities pedagogy are particularly relevant in this respect. These modes of engagement were mostly developed to enrich classroom interaction, but they gain further interest in the distance mode. If we are willing to employ digital tools and technologies creatively, literary instruction during times of social isolation need not be restricted to séance-like online meetings with mute icons masquerading as presence. And the evaluation of a small group of learners need not be a frantic rush to electronically replicate the dynamics of the physically proctored exam. This essay suggests some ways in which we could use digital tools to draw our students deeper into the texts they must learn to read critically. By making us participators in the process of interpretation in Heideggerian terms, these tools help us take a fresh look at our material and express our insights in non-traditional ways, turning the instructor into an enabler, who lets her students learn. Through a shifting perspective, the process of instruction can grow exciting for both student and facilitator and be sustainable even when the frustrations of physical distance and the inability to look a class in the eye will have happily become a thing of the past.
Journal of Literacy Research, 1998
In this article, we analyze one coauthor's 12th-grade English class, focusing on a small group of students who interpreted the character of Gertrude in Hamlet through a body biography, a life-sized human outline that students filled with words and images that represented their understanding of the character. We analyze the body biography production as a function of the social context of activity and then analyze the processes of composition involved in their production. Analysis of the data reveals that (a) the students exhibited different degrees of commitment to and involvement in the group task, (b) the degree of equity in productivity and social relations varied within the group in accordance with these different degrees of engagement, and (c) the inequity in social relations and contributions to the group product belied the degree to which the final interpretive product met the teacher's assessment criteria. We conclude with a reconsideration of the notion of engagement that includes attention to both the immediate social relations within the classroom and the histories of engagement that students bring to class.
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This article describes the basis of Questioning the Author, an approach to encourage students to engage with text ideas. The article begins with a description of what motivated us to design the approach, which was based on a series of studies conducted in the 1980s that provided a revealing look at how young readers interact with the ideas in their textbooks. We observed that students tended to resist grappling with text ideas, but rather dealt with text at a surface level. We hypothesized that students could be encouraged to consider text ideas if the reading situation was set up as a dialogue with a text's authorthus our notion of Questioning the Author. Examples of how Questioning the Author functions in classrooms are provided. A summary of findings from implementations of Questioning the Author are presented in terms of changes in the roles of both teachers and students in classroom discussion.
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In my eighth and ninth grade English classes, I have worked to create a culture in which students think openly and flexibly about literature, particularly when they face comprehension challenges. We seek out puzzling questions and difficult passages, navigating them together and thinking flexibly about possible meanings texts may hold, even when we are not totally sure what they mean. I have tried to build a classroom that celebrates confusion, openness, and mental flexibility as essential parts of the reading process. In the past, however, when it came to writing instruction, my curriculum told a different story. After years of following rich discussions of literature with composing analytical essays that were unexciting for students to write and just as unexciting to read, I knew something had to change. I wanted richer connections between the exploratory discussions students held and the thinking they did on the page (Styslinger & Overstreet, 2014). After completing the summer institute at my city’s National Writing Project site, I created more space for students to write in new genres about topics close to their hearts. Our literary writing, however, remained more or less the same. I knew that if I wanted students to engage in exploratory thinking in their writing, I needed to apply the same kind of flexible thinking we exercised in literary discussions to the design of my writing curriculum. In this article, I describe my shift away from literary writing that emphasized objectivity and rigid structures and toward literary writing that celebrated questions and flexible thinking.
Visual Materials, Staging, and the Internet in Literature Classrooms
Mediterranean Journal of Humanities, 2014
The aim of this paper is to show, through applicable activities; how the use of visuals can alter the way we teach literature in English as a foreign language classrooms. I designed a syllabus for the course titled "Introduction to British Literature I and II" in which visual materials were used to teach some major literary terms and movements. Two main data sources; the instructor's memos and prospective teachers' opinions of these activities were collected for this research study. Fashioned so as to build a more interactive literature classroom, the syllabus was realized with second year pre-service 22 ELT teachers and the findings suggest that using visual materials in literature classrooms can energize and motivate prospective teachers, energize the classroom interaction, bring greater motivation, and nurture students' need to concretize some of the abstract notions they studied. In this paper, descriptions of the tasks are given followed by the opinions of the students on these activities.