I've borrowed the title for my presentation today from Young and Fulwiler, who edited a collection of essays under this name--When Writing Teachers Teach Literature. I hadn't read the book when the ideas that shaped this paper began to take form in my thinking. Instead, this talk began to take shape when I was in the final throes of writing the same tired old syllabus for my English 102 classes at Community College of Allegheny County. At some point a few days before the semester began, I stopped thinking about whether I'd start the course with fiction or poetry and started looking at this introductory lit course--which is also the second-semester composition course--as a writing teacher. As my title, stolen from Young and Fulwiler, suggests, a major shift in perspective occurred when I began to think about my course as a writing teacher instead of thinking about it as a course in formalist criticism focused on genre.

Specifically, I stopped thinking about this second-semester composition course as a teacher-centered, lecture-oriented introduction to formalist analysis of texts organized by genre, which I evaluated through reading quizzes, essay tests short essays that imitated a teacher lecture on a text, and a research paper that regurgitated undigested opinions cribbed from published literary critics--well, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit here! And I began thinking about the writing portfolio I'd like to see my students share with me at the end of the semester, the kinds of writing and thinking I'd like them to be doing at that point, and I thought about all the ways I knew as a writing teacher to get them to produce those kinds of writing and thinking--journal writing and free writing, multiple drafting of essays, classroom workshops with peer feedback, one-to-one conferences, shaping a portfolio of writing that reflected their interests and strengths.

That's when I threw out the syllabus I'd been drafting and started all over again.

What I want to talk about today is the underlying assumptions of the course as it is usually described in college catalogs and departmental syllabi and the assumptions I made and foregrounded in redesigning the course from a composition teacher's perspective. I'll start by describing the course and the way I've taught it in the past--the standard approach, I believe. Then I'll describe my new design for the course. Finally, I'll tell you about where my redesign of the 102 course lived up to my hopes for it and where it fell short.

CCAC's English 102 course resembles many taught to freshmen across the country each year. After introducing them to the standard academic essay in the first semester of their college careers, we get to teach the real first love of our lives--literature--in the second semester. Didn't most of us major in English because we loved fiction and poetry and drama? So, second semester, we call the course "composition," but we teach an intro to literary analysis, and we require essays and research papers that embody the talk about literature that we love to participate in.

I suspect that many of you had the same kind of training that I've had in teaching literature. As an undergrad in the late 60s, I took genre courses like "The Nature of Drama" and "Poetry and Its Forms," where I learned that talking about literature meant New Critical analysis of theme, imagery, tone, etc., etc.--what one of my students a couple years ago persistently referred to as "ripping the text to shreds." My guess is that he was simply expressing more graphically what most students feel about this process of literary analysis: that a text is an encrypted message to be decoded, that teachers have been given a special edition of the textbook which enables them to decode the message, that some lucky few students can crack the code and figure out what the teacher expects them to get from a text, but for most of them, decoding literature and writing about its hidden meaning is a tedious and often baffling process. I'll bet they wonder why anyone would devote a lifetime to work like this, that often seems to destroy the poem or the story in the process.

One of the things I'd forgotten along my academic route to teaching, I'm afraid, was the sheer joy in aesthetic experience that first drew me to literature--the musical sound of the words, the magical places literary words transported me to. I think I must have forgotten that, because when I started teaching the introductory literature class in 1988, I taught it pretty much the same way I'd been taught about literature myself. That is, I taught analysis, on the unquestioned assumption that that is what people do when they talk about literature in the classroom. The problem in seeing the assumptions of New Criticism is that its influence was so pervasive in education for so many years that those assumptions have become invisible to us. We don't realize that breaking down a text into component elements reflects only one possible critical approach to talking about literature. For many of us trained in this school of criticism, literary criticism is New Criticism.

Of course, that is the assumption that underlies most of the textbooks written for this kind of a course: Kennedy's Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama (HarperCollins), Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), DiYanni's Literature: Reading Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and the Essay (McGraw Hill)--you know, those fat, luscious volumes packed with stories, poems, and plays--some lovely, fresh work in every edition. Don't we just drool over them? These textbooks and others organize literature by genre, in chapters that address "the elements of fiction" and the various rhetorical terms and metrical classifications that are the tools of our trade as explicators. If we teach from the textbook, the apparatus communicates the same assumption that the literary text is a cryptogram and that skilled readers of literature are skilled cryptographers--that decoding is the purpose and point of literature. (This is why students ask us, "Why didn't he just say what he meant?" when they're baffled by a poem. They know that's what we tell them to do in their writing.)

Typically, in a first-semester comp or basic writing class, I ask students to keep a journal, to write multiple drafts of essays over the course of the semester, to bring drafts to class for workshop sessions in which they give each other feedback and, often, obtain feedback from me as well, to schedule appointments with me to talk about writing problems they encounter. Their grade rests entirely on the portfolio they hand in at midterm and again at the end of the semester.

I evaluate on the basis of the portfolio for several reasons. The portfolio seems to communicate the importance of revising more effectively than grades on individual papers do. Also, I ask students to write a reflective cover essay for both the midterm and final portfolio. The reflective essays give them opportunities to assess their own writing and progress. This is where writing students really take greater responsibility for evaluating their own work, and I believe this evaluative process is one of the factors that increases the amount of revising students do. We also use a peer review process in assessing portfolios, as well as my evaluation by letter grade. Assessing each other's work helps students think in responsible ways about what constitutes high quality in writing. Students turn out to be very good appraisers of their own strengths and weaknesses, which makes my job of grading easier and in turn helps them think about how they can build on their strengths and reduce their weaknesses as they revise between midterm and the end of the semester. When they review their writing for the portfolio, they start to see patterns in the writing. Seeing patterns makes them better critics of their own writing. This is far more meaningful knowledge than it would be if I were to discover the same patterns and tell them what I saw.

Usually, at midterm I also ask students for some kind of prediction or plan for the reading, research, and writing they will do in the second half of the semester. When I ask students to plan their reading and research and future writing, I prompt them to take a more active role in their own education than they take when they are handed a syllabus of reading planned before the semester began (regardless of their interests and tastes) or when they are handed a one-size-fits-all writing assignment. Having to include a plan for the second half of the semester in the midterm portfolio helps students to begin thinking about the reading and writing they will do instead of waiting until the last minute before a deadline.

The moment when I thought about the kind of end-of-semester portfolio I'd like to see from my students was the moment when my perspective on the course changed. The departmental syllabus required three essays and a research paper. The way I'd taught the course before, the three essays reflected the genre divisions of the textbook--one on fiction, one on drama, and one on poetry.

I began thinking about the papers in the portfolio this way: I'd like to see some writing that showed how a student's personal response to a literary text led him or her to some analytical thinking about it. I'd like to see a piece of analytical writing--an explication or analysis or comparison/contrast essay. I'd like to see a piece of writing that brought some research to bear on a particular text. And then I'd like to read a research paper that explored something of interest to the student, whether that took the form of literary criticism, biographical research, or research into the historical context of a particular work or author. And I wanted them to keep a journal of personal responses to what they were reading. At this point, I knew what I wanted them to write in the course--so far, so good!

But this moment of insight turned out to be a real epiphany! When I thought about the writing requirements in this way, I stopped looking at the genre divisions of my textbook. I was more interested in finding ways to make the literary works vital and personally meaningful to my students, so that they could write interesting papers about them and do research on topics they cared about. But I realized that my departmentally chosen textbook was premised on a theory of literature as a series of coded messages, with some hints for decoding. I contrasted this presentation with what made literature vital and personally meaningful to me--often a theme that interested me and was relevant to my life at a particular moment.

The anthology offered me a wealth of texts that dealt with relationships, so I made relationships my theme--positive relationships between men and women, destructive relationships between men and women, relationships between people with different ethnic and racial backgrounds, relationships challenged by the hardships of war or death. I arranged a reading schedule for the first part of the term that cut back and forth across the genre divisions of the book.

Then I thought about how I wanted students to respond to the texts they would read. I wanted them to experience the same kind of fun I'd had in figuring out things about a text, so I knew I wanted them to talk in small groups about the assigned readings. They would talk more in small groups than in a teacher-directed whole-group discussion. Then we would compare responses across the whole class. I knew that if I asked students to talk about texts this way, collectively they would come up with a range of insights and points to make about each text. Maybe they wouldn't say everything that I could say about a particular text in a lecture, but what knowledge they did build would be more meaningful to them if they constructed it than it would be if I handed it down from the Mount and then tested them on my insights.

Because I've made journal writing a part of most of the classes I've taught, I asked students to keep a journal of personal responses. But I made it a dialogic or dialogue journal. Each student would write about the assigned reading before class. Then, the first part of each class meeting would be devoted to exchanging journals and commenting in writing on each other's responses. Each day, after giving students some time to do this, I'd ask each group to summarize the issues and questions raised during their discussion of their journal entries. Usually, this conversation took our entire hour and 15-minute class period. Occasionally, I answered questions about a text or supplied some background information, but on the whole, students answered each other's questions and helped each other understand the literary texts.

So I privileged reader response theory over formalist analysis, drawing on what my students brought to their reading as a useful resource.

Journal entries and the in-class discussions of them also served as a bridge into the first writing assignment: to write a personal response to a text of their choice and then segue into a more formal analysis or explanation of the text. The only requirement was that the text not be one we had discussed in class to date. We would work through the paper, and subsequent paper assignments, on a workshop model, with at least one day devoted to peer feedback on drafts--even though that meant sacrificing some of our time for talking about literature. "Less is more," as one of my IUP professors is fond of saying!

After the first paper was in, I handed out the remaining assignments all at once and asked students to begin planning their writing and research topics for the rest of the course. I had discovered, as they worked on that first essay, that many of them had done a fair amount of browsing before choosing their topic. One student told me he'd read ten stories that weren't on the syllabus! I hoped to stimulate more of the same kind of reading. But I told them they might focus on a single topic for their remaining writing for the course. For example, a student might write the "analytical" paper as a comparison/contrast of two stories by Faulkner, the research-based essay as a brief biography of Faulkner, and the longer research paper as an exploration of some published criticism of some of Faulkner's work. Several of my students took me up on this offer and spent the rest of the term reading and writing about one author in depth. I felt they gained more than they might have in surveying more literature in less depth. "Less is more."

I had originally intended to have students choose some of their own reading for the second half of the semester. After I found out how much reading they'd done as they selected topics, I chose instead to select a few long works but to keep the reading requirements minimal during the second half of the semester, so that they could focus more on their research and writing. We dawdled through Othello with two very different videotaped performances for comparison. I told them not even to read Death of a Salesman--we just watched it in class. What we did do was focus on their writing. Class time was increasingly devoted to students' writing and research processes. We didn't "cover" much as a whole class, but students were doing a lot of revising. I ultimately saw three drafts of the research paper, in most cases. As they worked toward preparing the final portfolio, many students did substantial revising of their first two papers. Also, they reviewed their journal entries and the responses to them because I required that they make a selection of only three to five journal entries for inclusion in their final portfolio and to explain in the cover essay why they'd chosen to include those particular three to five. I told them, "This portfolio is the visible record of what you've learned in English 102. It is as much for you as for me. Make choices and do the revising you need to to show what you've done in this class."

When a writing teacher teaches literature, the ways in which we think about and talk about and write about literature can go through a sea change. Was I pleased with the results? Yes and no.

Many of the students did a lot of work in this class. They did substantially more writing and revising than they would have as I'd taught the course before. Furthermore, they had to learn enough about what was in the textbook to make good choices for their reading and writing. (I used to give a list of suggested topics; this time, I refused--they had to be actively engaged in developing their topics.) We had constant conversation about the texts they were writing about, the writing they were doing, the research processes they were engaged in. Students gave each other meaningful feedback because not all of them had read the texts their peers were writing about--hence the writer had to provide sufficient quotation and context to make his or her point clear.

One of the surest signs of success to me was the interest that future education majors expressed. I had long talks with one student in particular, who kept asking me why I did the things I did in teaching this course.

Some students fell apart, though. As usual in a class where students are asked to take responsibility for their own reading and writing, some saw the flexibility as a lack of structure and standards. The breakdown seemed to come during the work on the research paper, about two-thirds of the way through the semester. It might have been due to the research; it might have been due to the pace. Maybe it was just spring--I'm not sure there were more students experiencing difficulty with course requirements than there would have been under my traditional regimen.

Yet I think that, for the successful students, my sacrifice of "coverage"--discussion of more literary texts--was a reasonable choice given the depth of the critical thinking required in thoughtful revising--revising that made students look more closely at both the literary texts and their own writing.

Will I do it again? Of course! Next time I teach the course--its equivalent at Bridgewater College, that is--I'll try to track student progress more carefully, so that I'm not just claiming the benefits of the redesigned course on the basis of my most positive impressions. I'm thinking of asking for email progress reports on a regular basis, for example. I'll let you know what I find out!

Go to my ENG120 syllabus or learn more about PCTELA or return to my homepage.