by Natalia Cecire, English
The project was designed to produce a scholarly community that would provide an intellectual context for research findings. Yet because the community was composed of students, all with similar experiences with nineteenth-century literature, the debates occurred in terms that were meaningful to the students at their particular stage of exposure to literary criticism, rather than in the remoter terms of my discipline.
by Carl Olsen, Scandinavian
Students often have trouble understanding why we can’t just “take the text as it is.” My…response has been to suggest that we consider our mission to be not just the reading of texts, but the exploration of a foreign culture by way of those texts: we are sleuths who have been given a collection of cultural artifacts.
by Monica Gehlawat, English
This activity is all about perspective. By creating a new way for the students to look at their writing, I was able to empower them to see how to change it. Tackling the sentences on the board all together with a clear set of drills transformed the debilitating immediacy of one’s writing into a liberating problem-solving experience.
by James Ramey, Comparative Literature
I was dismayed to find that we had been located in a small, windowless basement room in Haas Pavilion. Claustrophobia heightened my awareness of the need for the students to get along, which led me to wonder how I might structure my course, not only as an intellectual opportunity but also as a social one.
by Nichole Sterling, Scandinavian
Ultimately, I have found that creative projects can have place in composition courses. Creative projects can help students to understand what they read, and a greater understanding of what students read can only lead to better papers and better discussion in class.
by Leonard von Morzé , English
Students taking my reading and composition class may be better at uncovering sources than I am. Adept at searching Google Scholar and other online databases of articles…my most resourceful student writers continually demonstrate the capacity to plug appropriate and erudite-sounding quotations into their research papers…It might be useful, I thought, to get them to resist some of the familiarity they believed they already had with the research paper.
by Benjamin Yost, Rhetoric
Grappling with divergent understandings of a text is a highlight of the class, but for many students is also fraught with uncertainty and confusion…When they occur, I slow down the discussion, and remind students that different interpretations are not signs of hopeless undecidability, but reveal that arguments work only on the basis of particular assumptions.
by Vasudha Paramasivan, South and Southeast Asian Studies
To my class, it seemed almost irreverent to read into such marvelous tales, prosaic explanations of power struggles and gender discrimination. While their skepticism was welcome, I had to find some way of addressing their resistance to the idea that there could be meaning and purpose behind folkloric narratives.
by Mayumi Takada, English
I noted a startling discrepancy between the intelligent insights students provided in class and in office hours and the poor critical papers they wrote…In the language of high school math, they simply wrote out answers without showing their work. They were incapable of doing a close reading, the building block of literary writing and analysis.
by Mai-Lin Cheng, English
By juxtaposing classic literature with contemporary literature, film, and television, I hoped to help students connect with the literature in specific, personal ways that would help them become rigorous readers. Rigorous readers, in turn, develop into strong writers.