Lose the Chronology, Lose the Anthology: Clearing the Way for Innovation in American Literature Survey Courses (original) (raw)
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2020
In the discussion of teaching literature, one controversial issue has been whether professors should remain dispassionately objective to various political and philosophical ideologies in the classroom; or if they should influence their students with their political and philosophical views. On the one hand, some scholars argue that professors of literature cannot remain objective in their classroom because their choices of content, teaching methods, and ways of conducting classes not only reflect their ideologies but also influence their students. On the other hand, some others argue that professors should not influence their students with their political and philosophical views because the literature classroom is not a place for imposing professors' political agendas. Within this context, this paper examines the theories of teaching literature and seeks to answer this issue. Drawing on the works of Himmelfarb, Showalter, and McKeachie, this paper argues that although professors ...
Rethinking American Literature
College Composition and Communication, 1998
This volume, the fourth in a series, brings together the conversations of the profession that were explored during the 1993 and 1994 Summer Institute for Teachers of Literature. This anthology of essays considers what "American literature" is and how definitions of this category affect teaching practices. The essays argue for the recovery of often Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material: "Not Born on the Fourth of July: Cultural Differences and American Studies," by Gregory S. Jay, originally published in After Political Correctness: The Humanities and Society in the 1990s, edited by Christopher Newfield and Ronald Strickland.
Teaching a "New Canon"? Students, Teachers and Texts in the College Literature Classroom
College Composition and Communication, 1997
While graduate students at the University of Iowa, we were lucky enoughtruly, privileged enoughto have the opportunity to reflect upon what it might mean to be a "teacher" of literature in the post-secondary classroom. And while appreciative of that opportunity and of mentors, students, and colleagues, each subject to the consequences of our early mistakes, we also recognized that our training and reflection were largely improvisatory. We "made up" syllabi, grading policies, seating arrangements, presentation styles, responses to student writing, and so on. As we matured as teacherscholars in the midst of debates about the canon and cultural diversity, this pedagogical "creativity" was tested as a reliable means of action in response to the dizzying array of demands placed on us by students, texts, and the institution. We recognized early on that an attention to difference in the classroom must mean a disorientation and resisted the temptation to oversimplify, to retreat into the safety of text-based, teachercentered approaches. Bruce recalls sensing such a pedagogical epiphany when he realized that students' needs, knowledges, and expectations were perhaps the most important text of any class: My interest in the social dynamics of the literature classroom arose primarily out of my experience with a radical juxtaposition of two different teaching contexts. 1 began my college teaching career at California State University, Fresno. where classes were filled with students of amazingly diverse heritage. In a single class, I might have students of Basque, Armenian, African, Mexican, Hmong, Chinese, Japanese and European heritage. The degrees to which these students continued to share in the cultural values and beliefs a these origins depended, Of cool se, xi xii Bruce A. Goebel and James C. Hall For Jim, the need to explore a comprehensive pedagogical strategy was precipitated by the realities of identity politics: As a white scholar and teacher being trained as an African-Americanist, I was aware each and every day of the complexities Of my position in the classroom. Wht.t might "teaching" mean if' it was necessary for me to resist culturally imperialist 1' NS. xiv Bruce A. Goebel and James C. Hall any way." Despite the inclusion of canon-opening texts, the values and biases of the traditional canon remained unchallenged in the social dynamics of the classroom. We felt most imposed upon by these values, for example, when trying to think through questions of evaluation. How were we to reconcile what seemed to be a fairly straightforward decentering of authority with institutional responsibilities to "grade?" Our conversations together were marked by an anxiety about "consistency" and "integrity." How could we be telling students about cultural pluralism and the joys of interpretation while engaging in what seemed at times to be a fairly crude process of determining when people were "right" and "wrong?" While we were never radical relativists, it did seem incumbent upon us to discover what "evaluation" might mean if one was serious about democratic principles and canonical reform. A "new canon" was going to require an intense self scrutiny. These ruptures between literature, theory, and pedagogy brought us to the realization that there was a real need for systematic exploration about the relationship between classroom practice and the institutionalization of cultural democratic ideals. We set out to put together a collection of essays that would explore the needs of teachers who wish to serve their students effectively and also serve the idea of a "new canon." Within this collection, the "new canon" refer3 to more than a set of multicultural texts, fixed or changing. Instead, it indicates and describes comprehensive curricular change and an expanding repertoire of self-reflective teacher knowledge and strategies. In this sense the "new canon" emerges from and embodies an ethical, democratic process removed from utopian theory by its very application to the lives of real, diverse, complex students, teachers, and texts. As James Marshall pointed out during a recent NCTE conference session, theorists of culture and democracy have succeeded in identifying and articulating much of the problematics regarding race, gender, and social class, but they have failed to create a corresponding pedagogical technologylargely because they have failed to account for the social dynamics of real classrooms. Recent pedagogical specialists, from writing process advocates to reader-response theorists, have concretely outlined practical classroom methods but have failed to adequately connect them to contemporary debates regarding the relationship among a literary education, cultural diversity, and democracy.
The End of the History Survey Course: The Rise and Fall of the Coverage Model
Journal of American History, 2011
Textbooks and Teaching of Lendol Calder's "Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey" in the Journal of American History. Citing the work of cognitive psychologists, Calder argues that the coverage model, with its "facts first" approach, is "wrongheaded" and a failure even on its own terms. As an alternative, Calder suggests in a 2002 article, an "uncoverage" model centered on "a deliberate attempt to lay bare for students the central assumptions, forms of inquiry, and cognitive habits that transform data into knowledge for practitioners of our discipline." Sam Wineburg sums up the thrust of this pedagogical countermovement by arguing that it is historical thinking itself, rather than a particular body of historical knowledge, that should be the emphasis of history education. Students should learn to think like historians, and to accomplish this goal they must actively do history-not just "learn" it. 2 Contemporary pedagogical reformers, however, are largely unaware of the degree to which their work echoes earlier critiques of the coverage model. Criticisms of coverageoriented history teaching have abounded for over a century. An 1898 American Historical Association (aha) document, for instance, stated that "the chief purpose [of historical education] is not to fill the boy's head with a mass of material which he may perchance put forth again when a college examiner demands its production." In 1912 the Columbia University historian James Harvey Robinson critiqued the emphasis on chronology and the memorization of facts in the teaching of history. "A sensible carpenter or plumber does not constantly carry a saw in his hip pocket, or a coil of lead pipe over his shoulder, in order to be ready for a distant emergency," wrote Robinson, comparing content knowledge to the materials and tools of a craftsman. Rather, Robinson noted, "He very properly goes to his shop and his tool chest for his tools and materials." The most innovative general education history courses of the interwar and post-World War II periods, created at institutions such as Columbia, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University, prioritized the cultivation of critical engagement and analysis over comprehensive coverage. And in the late 1960s and early 1970s, several campuses implemented experimental introductory "history laboratory" courses. 3 Given this history of dissent and experimentation, it would be tempting to view the current pedagogical countermovement as simply the latest in a long string of futile efforts to dislodge the coverage model from its hegemonic position within the historical profession. The current reform effort, however, has been strengthened by the development of a disciplinary infrastructure rooted in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), an academic movement in which faculty engage in the systematic study of student learning using methods and approaches that are appropriate to their respective disciplines. SoTL
2001
This book is a collection of classroom-tested ideas for helping students explore how literature and "the canon" are made, what the term "American" means, and how the phrase "American literature" obscures the presence of multiple "literatures" that are both individually compelling and mutually enriching. Each section begins with an introductory essay. Following an introduction, the essays in Part 1, "A Gathering of Flowers: Making American literature helps to create American literature as surely as does bringing copies of Sharon Olds's poems to class. And students who blur genres by incorporating personal accounts into the traditional essay contribute, just as more sophisticated published writers do, to the x we mean when we say "literatures," but providing a succinct definition of this term is not easy. A quick glance at the self-descriptions of the University of Michigan's English Department in 1985 and 1995 illustrates the difficulty. In 1985 the description began, "Literature, broadly defined, represents the best that has been thought and said in the world. The literatures of England and America are not only extremely rich but leagues who teach American literature, we recognize that our discussions
Editors’ Introduction: The Politics of Teaching Literature
Research in the Teaching of English
Reading and English language arts function as a primary curricular space for "political interventions, struggles over the formation of ideologies and beliefs, identities and capital" (Luke, 2004, p. 86). For example, one urgent political intervention involves racial equity. Numerous literary texts provide opportunities for dialogue about race in our society. Novels like Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, plays like Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, and the work of poets like Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou have been part of high school English curricula in many districts and states for nearly a generation. However, in recent times, even this expanded canon has faced challenges from multiple fronts: the imperatives of neoliberal educational reform; corporate standardized testing that prioritizes "testable" curriculum; learning standards that squeeze out stories in favor of informational texts; and even the demands of critical and radical educators who, in efforts to further decolonize education, call multicultural classics into question, advocating instead for the teaching of literature that is more relevant to contemporary students' lives. When teaching literature for youth and young adults, many educators do so with the intent of creating ethical and literate citizens for a global society. Furthermore, in addition to the diversification of the literature that young people read, as the demographics of our classrooms, schools, and society shift, the application of critical lenses that are multicultural, diverse, decolonizing, and humanizing to all texts for youth and young adults will become even more essential (Botelho & Rudman, 2009). Some students of the social media generation are bringing their own critical lenses into our courses, while others are invested in nostalgia and more traditional ways of reading texts. Increasingly, there have been generational rifts, informed by social media, regarding which texts to use in the curriculum and how to teach them. As instructors of students coming from many different perspectives, it is our task to encourage discursive pluralism, even if this means leaning into pedagogies of discomfort (Boler & Zembylas, 2003). We do this in hopes that creative tension around the selection, evaluation, and teaching of literature will, as Dr. King noted in his famous letter from a Birmingham jail, lead to equity, justice, and social change.
Teaching Literature: Canon, Controversy, and the Literary Anthology
Hispania, 1997
Anthologies have evolved from literary collections of the Middle Ages, reflecting changes in scholarship, attitudes, and pedagogical needs. Their use brings up questions of canon, content, pedagogical apparatus, types, and focus. Although postmodernist critics reject the notion of canonicity, anthologies continue to be popular teaching tools.