There are a variety of teaching-related journals for the English literature and composition classroom. English departments also share vast resources, and instructors can find a variety of strategies focused on critical pedagogy, race, gender, inclusive teaching, and the intersection of English with other disciplines.
Journals and Websites
- Purdue Owl (longstanding website from Purdue University featuring curricular support and teaching resources for writing instructors)
- ProfHacker (essay series from Chronicle of Higher Education with advice and tips on teaching and technology in the humanities)
Articles and Papers
Introduction Excerpt: “English Subject Centre Seed Guides are short and practical guides especially written for those teaching English language, English literature and Creative Writing within higher education. They are intended to help early career lecturers or part-time tutors finding their feet, and also experienced lecturers looking for fresh ideas, or pointers in an unfamiliar area. The Guides are digests of key information and ideas designed to provide just enough information to ‘get you going’ and sow ideas from which, we hope, enhancements and initiatives can grow and develop.”
Excerpt (Page 132): “No matter how convinced we may be of our field’s importance, we need to radically shift how we present ourselves if we are going to survive. […] Stressing the marketable skills that our discipline can foster can help us change this dynamic. Incorporating more brain-based, active learning modules into our curriculum would be a step in the right direction. If we become known as an area where students learn practical skills such as problem-solving, oral and written presentation, and team building, we might change our reputation as the domain of the unemployable. By openly promising to train students for their future lives while we enrich their intellects, we could help keep ourselves viable during times of shrinking resources. […] Fortunately, the models I propose here increase student learning. Accordingly, we can continue to facilitate our students’ appreciation for poetry, drama, and other literary subjects while we better align ourselves with the twenty-first century.”
Excerpt (Page 249): “In this essay, I explore a distinctive way of teaching literature by focusing on the hometowns of authors, beginning with a hometown author of my own, including well-known writers as read from the perspectives of their home places, and moving on to authors from the hometowns of my students. I argue for hometown literature as a new way of reading and organizing literature and, even more important, for a hometown pedagogy that draws students powerfully into what they learn and how they learn it. The following work is informed especially by regionalism and bioregionalism; ecocriticism; and place studies.”
Excerpt (Page 428): “The four modalities of reading, writing, speaking, and listening […] are all predicated upon meetings. […]When we enter the domain of the English classroom, such notions of meeting proliferate. In a seminar, for instance, students and teachers, critics and theorists and authors all meet in a mutual act of subject construction. The pedagogical context of the English classroom is, therefore, extraordinarily complex. What is often overlooked is how students can be taught to engage with such metacognitive dimensions of subject and employ them within their independent study. How, in other words, can students be introduced to the abilities they need to function as effective independent learners in the higher education context?”
Excerpt (Page 192): “In this essay, I examine the very specific challenges I encountered in engaging my students [in the seminar ‘The Teaching of Literature’] to consider the necessity of teaching literature that requires immersion in the history and politics of locations other than the United States. […] It is around this pedagogical directive that my students and I debate. What is the appropriate amount of historical and political background in a class that purports to be about literature? How do we select the relevant background material so as to ensure a “balanced” perspective, given the biases and provocations inherent in the situation? If the instructor is not already familiar with the history and politics of the region, how can he or she craft a responsible pedagogy? What are the questions that we can pose to our students? The teachers and potential teachers in my course not infrequently observe that there is so much to learn that they do not know how or where to begin. They are, they claim, overwhelmed by the world. How then can they expect to be informed guides to their own students? These are the issues I take up in this essay.”
Excerpt (Page 406-7): “How do we convey that each of us provides one idiosyncratic view of a heterogeneous profession and its objects of study? Courses at the introductory level carry a particularly weighty burden given the amalgamation of intellectual concerns that literary and cultural studies has become. How do we help students make sense of the whole when we ourselves cannot? To respond to these challenges, I asked students to function as professors and to design, in small groups, their own Introduction to Literature syllabi. This semester-long project culminated in a series of final presentations whereby each ‘faculty team’ performed a mock first day of class. In twenty to thirty-minute presentations, they handed out actual syllabi and introduced us, their hypothetical students, to the themes and goals of their courses. As a result, the class witnessed ten differently organized introductions to literary study—a dramatic display of the interdisciplinary concerns of literary and cultural studies. In imagining English for themselves, students provided a more genuine introduction to the field than any I could have proffered on my own. To my surprise, most groups also theorized pedagogy: their syllabi articulated various kinds of learning expectations for students. Moreover, the presentations demonstrated a range of teaching styles that highlighted the pedagogical diversity of the profession. As such, the assignment quite literally modeled David Bleich’s “pedagogy of exchange” (2001). As a result, I now view students not merely as the beneficiaries of my own scholarly expertise but also as research partners. While the sciences have long had a tradition of involving undergraduates in research, the humanities have been harder pressed to provide the laboratory equivalent. In viewing the syllabus as an experiment, my students and I were able to think creatively and collaboratively about ways to organize literary study, and to what pedagogical ends.”
Excerpt (Page 124): “I will argue here that ‘learning to read literature comparatively’ and ‘learning to do critical cultural analysis’ can and must be put on a continuum, in a constructivist, activist, and multilayered approach to teaching students how to read literatures in cultural contexts, comparatively and otherwise. The concept of genre is, I believe, particularly fruitful for the discussion, since it provides a convenient heuristic for talking about patterns of communication and conventions that appear in all cultures (hegemonic or subaltern), albeit in different ways, and which are used as the points of ‘‘judiciousness’’ (Lyotard) around which nodes of cultural power and disempowerment rise. While the following discussion is based on a large body of research on teaching and learning, I will present my suggestions as a model framework for teaching practice. [… .] As I see it, the last two decades have called traditional canonicity into question but have developed few if any approaches to teaching literature compatible with a new focus on its cultural contexts. Thus, I will argue, in abandoning a blind faith in high literature and New Criticism we have sacrificed a concrete (if unacceptably limited) pedagogy for teaching students how to read texts, but we have not replaced it with a pedagogy for critical cultural studies.”
Berman, J. (2002). Syllabuses of Risk. Chronicle of Higher Education 48(23), B7-B9.
Excerpt: “[…] I believe that literature teachers can play a vital role in suicide prevention, just because reading – for good and for ill – often can trigger a highly emotional response. That is why those of us who teach literature may be among the first to realize, from a diary or personal essay, that a student may be depressed. We need to be able to recognize the warning signs of suicide, so we can make appropriate referrals to university counseling services.”
