James M. Lang edits WVU Press’s series Teaching and Learning in Higher Education and is also coeditor of the latest series book, Teaching the Literature Survey Course. With a new semester and the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association both on the near horizon, Jim agreed to share a version of the book’s introduction.
When I was an undergraduate in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I took the three literature survey courses that were required of all English majors at my university, and that remain a staple feature of English majors today: two surveys of British literature, divided somewhere between the Restoration and Romantic periods, and one survey of American literature. All proceeded as usual throughout the American and early British surveys, but early in the semester some tragedy befell the professor of the second half of the British literature survey, and the university had to scramble to find a replacement for him to allow the course to continue. The faculty member who took over the course was a political scientist. As an undergraduate, I had no glimpse into whatever internal processes led to this outcome, which now strikes me as exceedingly strange, especially given that this was a moderate-sized research university, which likely had plenty of graduate students and adjuncts on the English Department roster already.
Reflecting upon it now, it strikes me as equally strange that this visitor from another department didn’t seem to make much difference in the progress or nature of the course. It continued as usual, with the students reading the canonical works of the major authors from our doorstopper anthologies and the professor lecturing to us about the highlights of those works and their historical contexts. I do remember some quirky moments in the class, such as the time when he theatrically mocked Percy Bysshe Shelley for falling on the thorns of life and bleeding, but otherwise I am not sure I could have articulated any real differences between the course as taught by this political scientist and the other surveys I had taken.
This experience seems to me now, in retrospect, as emblematic of the two major pedagogical challenges that literature survey courses pose to us. First, survey courses by their very nature focus on skimming the surface of a large range of course material, which means that you don’t need specialized expertise in a particular area to teach them; they lend themselves well to teaching by generalists—or, in the case of my late-British survey, disciplinary interlopers. Of course surveys skim surfaces with good intentions, especially if they are taken at the outset of an English major: they are designed to provide historical and literary context which will help inform the upper-level courses that students take as they progress into their majors.
Against this admirable intention, however, we must now place the growing body of research in learning which contrasts surface and deep learning, and which suggests that surface learning correlates with short-term and shallow learning. Surface learning occurs when students focus on memorizing key facts and principles without gaining a more comprehensive understanding; faculty reinforce surface learning when they create assessments that reward this approach, such as exams which require identification of authors or works or events but little analysis, or essays which require students to parrot back traditional readings in the standard essay format. Deep learning occurs when students see or create connections between the course material and their own lives and experiences, when they have the opportunity to take what they are learning and process it in challenging and creative ways, and when they take active control of their learning and the ways in which they demonstrate it to their professor.
The nature of a survey course, often taught to large numbers of students in traditional lecture format, does not encourage these kinds of deep approaches to learning. As a result, I have always been skeptical of the survey’s admirable intentions: a survey course that spends a few weeks hitting the highlights of Romantic poetry, reading the classic works in the field and then asking students to process them in an essay or midterm exam, gives students a superficial exposure that seems unlikely to remain with them two years after the conclusion of the course when they are picking up the material again in an upper-level course.
The second major pedagogical challenge of the survey stems from the fact that its broad scope of material, covering massive amounts of literary and historical territory, tends to dictate a single pedagogy: the traditional lecture. Because no faculty member earns a PhD in the entirety of American literature, or in British literature from 1800 to the present, survey teachers are almost always teaching for much of the semester outside of their traditional areas of expertise—my political science professor, teaching a literature survey course, represented an extreme version of a very common experience for survey teachers. My experience observing new faculty members, in my role as the director of a teaching center on my campus, has taught me that when faculty members feel inexperienced or uneasy with the material, they turn to the lecture, which ensures that students won’t have the opportunity to ask questions or make objections that will reveal the lecturer’s lack of expertise. As long as the professor keeps talking, she remains an expert; when a hand goes up, the facade may fall.
At the other end of the spectrum, because we place such weight on the survey in terms of its role in the English major, some faculty seem to feel an extra obligation to ensure that the survey covers as much material as possible, and that impulse to “cover” lots of material translates into densely packed lectures stacked upon one another throughout the semester. These faculty members feel that they do students a disservice if they deviate much from the lecture— that giving students the opportunity to discuss it or engage in other forms of active learning detracts from time spent on the essentials. When you have only one day to cover a figure as important and seminal as William Wordsworth, you have to pack in as much poetry and history as possible—how to justify ceding precious class time to students’ fumbling interpretations of his greatest poems?
This book represents an effort to respond to the dual pedagogical challenges of the literature survey—its tendencies toward surface-level learning and lecture-based teaching—with concrete suggestions from survey teachers who have tried different approaches to the course. All of the essays in the volume have been supplemented with one or more course documents that we asked the authors to provide, and which you will find at the end of each essay. These take different forms: many of our authors contributed the syllabi for their survey courses, while others chose to include assignment sheets or descriptions from the projects they assigned to their students. If you are like the three editors of this volume, you are always curious to see what other people are doing in their survey courses, and we thought this final section of course documents would give you a handy place to view some other ways in which survey teachers frame their courses and describe them for their students. Although teaching is in some ways a highly social activity, in that we are always in the room with lots of other human beings, it can also seem like a very lonely activity, in that none of those other human beings in the room are our fellow teachers. We also tend to limit our conversations about teaching to quick hallway or social media exchanges, and hence don’t have the time to settle in and consider how another teacher might approach the same course that we are teaching, and re-see our own courses in the light of these other possibilities. You will find among the documents possibilities from every one of the major literature surveys. We hope that, in addition to ideas that might emerge from your reading of the essays, others might arise from your perusal of the course documents.
That hopeful sentiment brings us to the ultimate goal of these essays: to provide teachers of literature surveys with new ideas that will help them create significant learning experiences for their students. You can feel confident in the educational grounding of those ideas; the essays that we selected for inclusion in this volume all present approaches that reflect well what we know about how students learn. The pathways they offer to innovation in survey courses are well-grounded in research on teaching and learning in higher education. But new approaches to the survey have the potential to benefit not just the students. A few consecutive years of teaching the survey can lead all of us into well- traveled ruts that grind away at our own passion for the literatures and histories we offer to our students. Faculty need fresh injections of energy and inspiration as much as students, and nothing livens up a teaching career like launching a major new pedagogical strategy or reconceptualizing a course around a major new project. We hope you will find essays or documents in here that provide a blueprint for exploring new territories of survey pedagogy, beginning next semester and in the years to come.
Course Document: Chris Walsh, Boston University
The Blank Syllabus Essay Assignment
In a 1,250–1,500-word essay, discuss a selection of your own choosing (one not already listed on the syllabus) from the Norton Anthology of American Literature, volume B. Choose a text that is at least one page long and craft an argument about the suitability of the piece for class reading. As you write, think about the questions we generated in class—the questions you would have about a classmate’s selection. What is the piece about? Why do you like it? Who wrote it, for whom, and why? What genre is it? How does the piece advance our understanding of themes discussed in class or in the Norton introduction—religion and transcendentalism, for example, or immigration and xenophobia? How does it connect, or not, to life in 2017? You don’t have to answer all of these questions, but your essay should tell us about the substance of your selection (so you’ll need to include a brief summary) and about why reading it will be worth our time. As you draft, it may be helpful to have a working thesis that begins, “I recommend we read this text because . . . ” Simply deleting the “I recommend . . .” may work for the final version of this claim, but, as we’ll discuss in class, the claim should also respond to the question or problem established in your introduction.
Initial Reading Schedule for The Blank Syllabus
[At the beginning of the semester, students see the following text and schedule]
Reading assignments must be completed by the beginning of class on the day noted in the schedule below (where “A” refers to the Norton Anthology of American Literature, Literature to 1820, volume A; and “B” refers to the Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1820–1865, volume B). You will notice some blank spots beginning in October. These will be filled in with your names and with the titles of the selections you choose to write about for the first essay (details above). On the day your name appears, you will tell the class why you chose the selection, point us to a passage you found particularly striking, and conclude with questions or comments to spark discussion.
September 6
Iroquois and Pima creation stories (A 19–33)
September 8
Christopher Columbus (A 34–38)
Bartolomé de las Casas (A 38–42)
September 13
William Bradford, from Of Plymouth Plantation (A 156–83)
September 15
John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (A 205–17)
September 20
Anne Bradstreet (A 239–40, 262–65, 269–70)
September 22
Edward Taylor (A 356–62)
September 27
Mary Rowlandson, “A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration . . .” (A 308–40)
September 29
Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (A 498–509)
October 4
Benjamin Franklin (A 516–38)
October 6
Abigail and John Adams (A 682–98) T
Thomas Paine (A 704–18)
October 11
Thomas Jefferson (A 726–32)
October 13
Phillis Wheatley (A 808–24)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (B 1160–76)
October 19
_____________ & ______________
October 24
_____________ & ______________
October 26
_____________ & ______________
October 31
_____________ & ______________
November 2
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (B 1807–50)
November 7
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life . . . of an American Slave (B 2032–63)
November 9
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life . . . of an American Slave (B 2063–97)
November 14
_____________ & ______________
November 16
Whitman, “Song of Myself ” (B 2232–50)
November 21
Whitman, “Song of Myself ” (B 2251–74)
November 28
_____________ & ______________
November 30
_____________ & ______________
December 6
_____________ & ______________
REVISED SCHEDULE for The Blank syllabus
[After students have completed “The Blank Syllabus Essay Assignment” (above), I distribute the revised schedule with their selections (and mine) followed by their names:]
As you know, on the day your name appears, you will tell the class why you chose the selection, point us to a passage you found particularly striking, and conclude with questions or comments to spark discussion.
October 19
Irving, “Rip Van Winkle” (B 980–91; Tess)
Bryant, “Thanatopsis” (B 1072–74; Calla)
October 24
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown” (B 1263–73; Christine) and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (B 1313–32; Mr. Walsh)
October 26
Harriet Jacobs, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” (B 1759–78; Simone)
Fanny Fern, “Male Criticism on Ladies’ Books” (B: 1748; Kandice)
October 31
Poe, “The Raven” (B 1518–21; Carlos)
Poe, “The Cask of Amontillado” (B 1592–97; Malcolm)
November 2
Thorpe, “The Big Bear of Arkansas” (B 1780–88; Cece)
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (B 1807–50; Mr. Walsh)
November 7
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life . . . of an American Slave (B 2032–63; Mr. Walsh)
November 9
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life . . . of an American Slave (B 2063–97; Mr. Walsh)
November 14
Abraham Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address” and “Second Inaugural” (B 1616–17; Tim and Sylvie)
Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government” (B 1792–1806; Melinda and John M.)
November 16
Whitman, “Song of Myself ” (B 2232–50; Mr. Walsh)
November 21
Whitman, “Song of Myself ” (B 2251–74; Mr. Walsh)
November 28
Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (B: 2330–54; John T. and Sylvie)
November 30
Dickinson, “I Started Early—Took My Dog—” (B 2520) and “My Life Had Stood—A Loaded Gun—” (B 2525; Mary); “Much Madness is Divinest Sense” (B: 2515; Mr. Walsh)
December 6
Louisa May Alcott, “Transcendental Wild Oats” (B 2574–86; Maria) Emma Lazarus, (B 2597–601; Lindsay)