December 19, 2022
Teach Literature the Right Way
The title of this post might make you think it’s not relevant to you if you’re not a literature teacher or a writing advisor. Not so fast. Though in this post I indeed share with you how to teach literature the right way – based on 12 years of university experience – the lessons are highly revealing to everyone who’s interested in literature.
If you’re a writer, you want better readers.
If you’re a reader, you want better books to read.
And of course, if you indeed teach literature – at any level and in any capacity, be it a college teacher or simply running a local book club – you will find plenty of interesting tips here. As I often say, I don’t claim to have the best (let alone the only) solutions. But my advice is honest, not trying to please audiences or sponsors (which I don’t have any).
I’ve divided the post into 3+1 short sections: The first three describe the foundations of how you could approach teaching literature to others; what goals to set, what methods to use, what to expect. The fourth one is a list of practical tips, based on my long and painful experience – as a student as well as a teacher.
How to Teach Literature: Establish Goals
When we teach something, we have a goal. If we teach a child how to tie their shoelaces, the obvious goal is that they’re able to consistently do it on their own. If we teach someone how to dance in a certain style, the goal is that they memorize the steps, follow the rhythm, and have an overall expressive presence, consistent with the style.
But how do we go about setting goals for when we teach literature?
After all, literature is a characteristically ambiguous affair. There are basically no right and wrong answers, only well argued and less well argued interpretations.
To understand what goals you need to establish when you teach literature, you must reflect on the scope of your teaching.
Understanding Scope
In plain terms, this means that you should adapt your teaching to:
- possible requirements. If you’re a college teacher, it’s very likely you need to follow a certain curriculum, which means the students, by the end of the course, have a good grasp of the material – how you measure that is something we’ll see later, in “Assessment and Expectations”. Depending on the specifics, you can still have latitude. For example, when I taught Gothic fiction at the university, I had 100% freedom in choosing the curriculum, but that’s likely an exception.
- professional obligations. If you’re a writing advisor and someone has paid you to teach them how to write, they expect to be better by the end of the course. Again, we’ll see in a while how you can assess that.
- possible limitations. Maybe you don’t have enough experience or available time to analyze a certain aspect of literature, but you have plenty of experience (or time) for another. Teaching, at any level and in any form, is a filtering process. You can’t talk about everything, period.
- your audience. As a writer (leaning much more heavily toward being an artist), I don’t really care about selling books. This means, I don’t adapt to my audience. But when we teach literature, it’s imperative to adapt to your audience. To put it bluntly, though you can teach Hamlet both to 10-year-old kids and to 20-year-old undergrads, the goals you set cannot possibly be the same.
A general goal which is applicable in virtually every scenario is this: Everyone participating in the teaching process – yes, that means the teacher, too! – should come out of it a little bit wiser about the subject.
How to Teach Literature: Choose Methods
To an extent, the way you teach literature – the methods you will use – also depend on the scope, as I showed you above. Clearly, any requirements or limitations might limit you. Nonetheless, in my experience, the more varied your methods are, the better.
Put yourself in the students’ place: How interested would you be hearing someone blabbering about something for half an hour? Also keep in mind that, even if this blabbering is accompanied by cute diagrams and PowerPoint presentations, it still counts as blabbering.
The best thing to do – and I can’t imagine a scenario where you wouldn’t be able to do that – is to involve the students; keep them engaged. Here are some methods I used when teaching that proved highly efficient:
- Ask questions. Yes, it’s basic; yes, most students dislike it. But you can address that by asking wiser questions. Instead of fact-based, either-you-know-or-not questions (that are mostly pointless when you teach literature), focus on affect – yes, amazingly, it applies here too! In other words, ask how it felt.
- Group work. This might not always be applicable (e.g. during private tutoring), but peer work can be great. It doesn’t even have to be anything spectacularly original. Just as long as you “trick” the students into talking amongst themselves.
- Show the bigger picture. Depending on the subject, it might be hard for students to realize why something is relevant or important to their contemporary reality. This is a huge step in keeping them engaged. If you have a student who thinks Hamlet is boring because it’s 400 years old, they won’t respond to your teaching without first understanding why Hamlet is highly, highly relevant. Sometimes others have done this for you, so you can simply show the associations (in our example, modern adaptations of Hamlet would help). Or, discover them yourself and talk about it. I was once lucky enough to have a student who actually did my job for me – read the story in the post about Frankenstein and MeToo.
- Use toys or gadgets. I sometimes used a little Cthulhu doll – it was cute, made everyone smile – this way: I voiced a term, character, or other relevant word from the topic we were working on that day, then threw Cthulhu to one of the students. They needed to quickly, without thinking too much, voice the first association they got, then pass Cthulhu along, to another randomly selected student. It might sound silly, but it produced plenty of intriguing subconscious associations that we could talk about.
How to Teach Literature: Assessment and Expectations
If you set goals for something, you need to have a way of assessing whether they were achieved at a given stage. When it comes to teaching literature, assessment is sometimes already predetermined: College students are usually expected to take a test, write an essay, or similar. Once I offered my students the opportunity – instead of writing an essay – to present a paper at an academic conference I was organizing at the same time.
But beyond these rather formal (though often useful) methods of assessment, what else can you do to see whether the goals were achieved?
Once again, this will depend on the scope. If, for instance, you’re a writing advisor and someone pays you to teach them how to write better, you should establish a way (and communicate it clearly at the beginning of the process) of measuring that.
Perhaps you could ask them to self-assess. After all, self-assessment is key to understanding one’s self, and writers are the final authority on their work. This would involve beginning the course with the student/writer having to write a short story on a given topic/prompt, then at the end write a different story on a similar one (though preferably not exactly the same).
What About Generic Goals?
In plain terms, if the goal is for everyone to be a little bit wiser and know a little bit more about literature after the process, how can you gauge that?
The truth is, this is a bit of a trick question. When you teach literature, you know before the end of the process whether your students have learned something or not. In a way, it’s not a matter of assessing whether this generic goal has been achieved (it’s exceedingly difficult to learn nothing when exposed to such a process), but rather of seeing how to improve things.
In a way, this is the time for self-reflection.
What went well, and what not so well? What did the students like the most/least? It’s a meta–learning process: a chance for you to learn about how to teach literature.
Though written feedback is often encouraged (and sometimes required) for college students, you don’t need to limit yourself to that. What I did was to use the last day of teaching as a debriefing sort of opportunity. We quickly summarized the course in 5-10 minutes, then we openly discussed with my students what they liked and what not, what text was their favorite, etc. This, by the way, is a great way of also finding out how much your students have learned.
Of course, for this to happen, your students must trust you. Which brings us to some practical tips.
Practical Tips
Not everything will necessarily be applicable to you, but the lessons behind them are important:
- Trust is imperative. If your students don’t trust you – in the sense of relying on what you have agreed – they won’t engage with you and the teaching. If you’ve agreed to do something, do it. If there’s a really pressing reason that something you’ve promised can’t happen, you must apologize and clearly explain why you’re forced to change it.
- This also means, forget silly hierarchies. You are the teacher and they are the students, but you are not “better” and they are not “worse”. You just happen to know something more than them on literature, and still, you don’t know everything (or even much), either. Also remember that there aren’t right and wrong things to say; only well and less well argued statements.
- Have teaching priorities. As an undergrad student, I had a teacher who insisted on filling my papers with red ink, from correcting typos and other errors to adding long, meaningless remarks on how in their opinion something should’ve been argued. From some point and on, I stopped paying attention to these corrections altogether. Conversely, I had another teacher (who later became one of my doctoral supervisors) who almost never bothered to correct typos or syntax errors. Once or twice they did, and let me tell you, I never made the same mistake again.
- Never, ever stop a student from being creative. Believe it or not, I’ve suffered this too as an undergrad student. It was a detective fiction class – mentioning this probably makes it possible to identify the teacher for anyone who knows me at the university; fuck it, she should’ve known better – and we had to select a topic for the final essay. I wanted to experiment with something unique, so I went to her and said I’d like to approach Othello from the perspective of detective fiction tropes. I expected her to be happy, saying it was original and worth pursuing. Instead, she offered what it then felt as a bit patronizing smile, saying that detective fiction is a popular genre, why would I want to mess with Shakespeare. I ended up picking another topic (I don’t even remember what), getting top marks for the class, but I never forgot the disappointment.
- There is life outside the course. “Nothing is more important than gardening, and even that is not very important”, an old Chinese proverb purportedly affirms. As an existential nihilist, I certainly agree! But you don’t have to be a nihilist to realize that students have their own lives, their own worries, their own priorities outside the course. Be kind and accommodating, to the extent it’s possible. Talk. Find solutions. Understand the worries of those you teach. Even if you’re a writing advisor who’s paid to teach a single person (an adult, even), you have certain responsibilities in terms of “reading the room”, realizing they’re having a bad day, or going through a phase. Emotional IQ helps a lot here.
In the end, it’s about knowing what you aim for. We can’t teach literature as a complete, easily definable process – like teaching someone how to tie their shoelaces. Inevitably, we must filter. As I said, you might have certain requirements to follow, or other limitations. But you can’t go wrong with teaching critical thinking and helping everyone (yourself included) come out of the course a little bit wiser.
4 Comments
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I’m hoping any teaching days I have are well over (would you have wanted Charlotte Brontë to teach your class on Jane Eyre, if that were a thing?), but they were very small, very specific, and lots of fun – and mostly I just pushed reading, because that’s the way I learned.
I homeschooled three rather bright children (they were all reading by 3 which made it much simpler), and had little energy. One needed a few pointers from phonics and sounding things out for a short while until he ‘got it,’ so I did a bit of that, but I never tried to guide their reading except by throwing some big fat anthologies into the mix. Not really my fault that they all ended up STEM – poor kids, it was in their genes, even the artistic one. But all I can say in my defense was that I never ruined the pleasure of reading fiction for them, and they claim to remember fondly my reading Silas Marner to them (I have zero memory of it). LOTS of books.
But it might be fun, some day, to be available to discuss something I’ve written. Continuing to miss wide swaths of topics normally covered in literature classes. Ah well, what can you say about authors? Random bunch of misfits, thinking they can write anything they want.
“Very small, very specific, and lots of fun”. This basically summarizes the entire post! That’s what it should all be about, ultimately.
Excellent post. I always wanted to hold a reading group. For some time, I actually did, but it didn’t work out as expected. Not only did I lack clarity of what I expected, it came forth as mere dilettantism. After this post, I’d do it all differently: from the book selection to the meetings themselves. I’d also target some sort of production by the end: to have the audience write something, or paint something, or film something, doesn’t matter, but have them produce something as a consequence of reading and meeting for the whole year. This post also gave me ideas for other endeavours. We’ll see what comes out of it.
Making mistakes is an inevitable part of learning – anything, from teaching to writing and from building a house to going to the moon.
Great to hear I’ve inspired you!