Thoughts about teaching, literature, and teaching literature
It’s Friday. 2:55. The sky a granite-grey as the heft of the clouds seem to throw themselves into your classroom. You’ve just spent 45 minutes teaching, exploring, discussing a poem. In fact, not just any poem, but a great poem. A beautiful poem. Heaney’s ‘Blackberry-Picking’. Mid-sentence you notice a hand shoot up from the corner... Continue Reading →
The disciplinary disposition of English is one of possibility, exploration, and ambiguity. We write to explore an interpretation and to persuade our reader of it validity, but, always, with a clear sense it is just one of many ways we could understand that image, line or text. The epistemological horizon of English Literature as a... Continue Reading →
I’ve recently been playing with a new (to me at least) classroom setup and way of teaching poetry. I’ve used this strategy with various classes now and across various texts, although not yet beyond poetry. It is reasonably simple to set up and orchestrate, with its major benefit being to promote greater depth of discussion... Continue Reading →
Live modelling is such a powerful strategy to help disclose the deep disciplinary thinking that can so easily remain invisible to students. However, as with anything, it is also possible for it to go wrong or at least for it be used sub-optimally. One way this can happen is if we don’t focus enough on... Continue Reading →
A couple of days ago I came across this incredibly interesting observation by Peter Stockwell, which immediately got me thinking about lots of things related to essay writing: If there is a canon of literary texts that move in and out of preference over time there is also a canon of acceptable critical discussion that... Continue Reading →
Recently, I have been reading a lot about Text World Theory (and specifically the work of Ian Cushing and Marcello Giovanelli) as I think this has massive potential for how we frame a lot of English teaching and literary pedagogy. However, I’m still working my way through its implications and experimenting with how to use... Continue Reading →
Before outlining this strategy to help students to encounter and explore a poem, first a question: when teaching poetry, what is the appropriate weight to give to our own interpretation of the poem? I think this is a really interesting question. Presumably, before we teach a poem we read and think about it first, perhaps... Continue Reading →
We often think very carefully about what material we want students to retrieve, but of equal importance is how they retrieve it. As with much of teaching, this ‘how’ is probably best filtered through the lens of subject specificity, triangulated of course with the underpinning science of how we learn. Yet, the mechanism by which... Continue Reading →
The Game of Crossing Out is an exceptionally fun retrieval game that is very simple to organise and gets students thinking. Here’s how to play: 1. Students first of all write down everything they can remember about a given text, theme or idea. This really can be anything. You explain that the more they write,... Continue Reading →
I’m currently working my way through an excellent series of Massolit lectures by John McRae that looks at unseen poetry. They’re great, really useful for teachers preparing unseen poetry, with lots of excellent choices and ways of framing an encounter with them. However, I’ve been especially struck by a question John McRae asks across several... Continue Reading →
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