Tell us about your course.
My courses range from 200-level introductions to the English major to specialized upper-level undergrad and graduate courses. Most classes are small (15-25 people), reading-heavy and discussion-based, incorporating a range of formal and informal writing assignments.
What specific practices do you use in the classroom to facilitate meaningful discussions?
I tell my students that the most important work in our course is the collaborative learning they will do together, and then I enact that principle in the classroom. I lecture only on important contextual material, never offering interpretations of our texts. I try to model a radical openness to multiple ideas and guide students through a process of follow-up questions toward stronger, more internally coherent and textually grounded interpretations. I also use visual mapping of our discussions (note-taking on the whiteboard, creating collaborative thought-maps) to emphasize that all ideas are valuable and to make easier the process of seeing how they might fit together: where the alignments and dissonances are. It’s a dynamic collaborative process through which they experience literary analysis in action.
How do you know when your practices are working?
If I see an improvement in students’ papers over the course of the semester, of course, that’s an indication that at least one of my goals has been achieved. Improvement can mean many things, and one of the qualities I look for is greater willingness to take an interpretive risk, to argue something that hasn’t already been discussed in class with regard to a particular text. Beyond formal assessment, however, I look for evidence that a vibrant learning community has developed: when students start responding to each other rather than only to my questions, and when they are already talking about the assigned reading when I walk into the room ahead of the start of class, I see those as very good signs.
What are you excited to try next in your teaching?
I have already begun – on a small scale – incorporating alternative grading in my classes, and I’m excited to continue learning more about and expanding this pedagogy. I think, if used properly, it can orient students toward deeper, more creative thinking about texts and a greater willingness to take risks. I’m also committed to continually learning about how to make my courses more accessible in terms of capturing and sharing notes on in-class discussion, what kinds of texts I choose to assign, when and how I provide reminders about upcoming deadlines, and so on.
