APPRENTICE SCHOLAR, APPRENTICE WRITER JULIET MCMASTER University of Alberta T he conversation went roughly like this: “What’s that other thing you guys do?” “Other thing ... ? Us guys ... ?” “Yeah, that other thing you profs do. Besides teaching us. What’s that called?” “You mean research? Scholarship? Publication?” “Yeah, that. Why don’t you teach us to do that too?” Such a conversation, and I have had it (once almost in that very form, and other times in different forms, almost all the way to silence), announces a staggering gulf in communication that I did not know was there, and should have. It is easy to get used to talking to the more sophisticated students, the ones who talk to us. And with those we can safely assume that “research,” “scholarship,” and “publication” are activities about which they have clear ideas, activities in which they know they are taking preliminary steps, more or less halting or assured; steps the prof is actually doing what she can to assist. But even if only a few students have some vague and looming belief in a secret and delicious other activity of ours, a mysterious professional professorial indulgence that we devote our best efforts to keeping out of their reach, something needs to be done to convince them otherwise. The professional skill that English professors most usually purvey in the classroom tends to be the critical. Undergraduate students learn that inter pretation is required of them, and that their grade will reflect the quality of their interpretation and the case they make for it. In this process they learn to read and to assess other people’s interpretations of their text; and the tendency is to graduate from merely echoing the professor or a published critic to taking issue with the other interpretation by way ofadvancing their own. All this is familiar enough, whatever the branch of criticism or critical theory that happens to pertain to this body ofliterature and this particular classroom approach. The nuts and bolts ofscholarship, however,—such matters as the author ity and source of the text, biographical introductions, historical and other explanatory annotations—unlike the critical interpretations that students learn to challenge, tend to be still accepted as god-given and authoritative, English Studies in Canada, 22, 1, March 1996 beyond the sphere of their knowledge or judgment, certainly of their prac tice. The ambitious student may see himself as a critic who has discovered the last word in what this text really means. But it’s only rarely that she sees herself as an editor, more rarely still as an annotator. That stuff is fact, not interpretation; and she’d better not mess with it. So goes the assump tion. In the long process ofpersuading our students to think and to find out for themselves, it has been my experience that nearly all of them maintain a reservation about the scholarly apparatus of their texts. If that’s in print, it must be so. Since I had that eye-opening conversation with the student who wanted to be taught how to do what profs do—research, scholarship, publication, that stuff—I have tried to find ways to engage the classes I teach in scholarly enterprises adapted to students’ skills and their levels of attainment (not to mention their time limitations). I have been aware that most of my assignments called for critical interpretation. But by way ofvariety I started to introduce other kinds of question. Acourse in children’sliterature offers particular kinds ofopportunities for scholarship, since it is a field where one can safely say much remains to be done. There are the classic texts, such as the Alice books, Huckleberry Finn, and The Wizard of Oz, which have been very thoroughly worked over, with painstakingly established texts, historical and interpretative introductions, and very full annotations. The models are there. Such are Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Alice and Michael Patrick Hearn’s The Annotated Wizard of Oz. But because this is children’s literature, many of the texts have hardly been worked over at all: they provide tempting blanks in scholarly geog raphy as seductive as any nineteenth-century map of the Dark Continent. T.H. White...