English Literature Course Research Articles

Bringing back sweet (and not so sweet) memories: the cultural politics of memory, hip‐hop, and generational identities

This article examines the salience of collective ‘memory’ and ‘remembering’ among a group of students in Hip‐Hop Lit, a hip‐hop centered English literature course that I co‐taught at ‘Howard High School,’ an urban high school in the Northeastern United States. Specifically, this article examines the memory work that occurred within Hip‐Hop Lit in response to the students’ interactions with one of the course texts, Things Done Changed by rapper Notorious B.I.G. From this and other classroom texts, students were able to construct, contest, and reinscribe memories about the past. Through these memories, students were able to reaffirm and challenge particular social identities that informed and reflected their lived experiences.

Wounded Healing: Forming a Storytelling Community in Hip-Hop Lit

Background/ContextOver the past 5 years, there has been a growing body of scholarship that examines the intersections of hip-hop culture and classroom pedagogy. Although recent scholarship has persuasively demonstrated the classroom potential of hip-hop texts for promoting student engagement, scaffolding sanctioned forms of knowledge, and nurturing critical consciousness and activism, little work has been done to unpack the complex relations of power that emerge in such classrooms. In particular, we know very little about the ways in which students and teachers are (re)positioned within classrooms that engage in hip-hop-centered pedagogy. This article contributes to the current literature in hip-hop based education, culturally relevant pedagogy, and critical pedagogy by examining the some of the issues and tensions that emerge when teachers engage in hip-hop-centered classroom pedagogy.Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of StudyThis study details how the articulation of personal narratives within Hip-Hop Lit, a hip-hop-centered high school English literature course, produced a practice of “wounded healing,” in which people bearing the scars of suffering shared their stories in ways that provided a form of release and relief for themselves and others. This article highlights the complex relationships that students forged with the course's hip-hop texts, many of which resonated with their own lived experiences. I then illustrate how these relationships enabled the classroom discussions and interactions from which the practices of wounded healing emerged. Finally, I highlight some of the dilemmas and tensions that emerged as my coteacher and I attempted to privilege the stories and experiences of our students and ourselves within the classroom.SettingData for this study were collected at “Howard High School,” a small comprehensive urban high school in the northeastern United States.Research DesignData for this 1-year ethnography were collected using field notes, formal and informal interviews, document analysis, and video data.Conclusions/RecommendationsThis article shows how Hip-Hop Lit operated as a space in which members offered and responded to various types of individual and group narratives through the practice of “wounded healing.” Through this practice, students were able to recognize the commonality of their experiences, challenge various ideologies, and produce new knowledge. In doing this, the members of the class forged a cohesive community replete with multiple roles and relations of power. This article points to the need for critically interrogating the ostensible virtues of hip-hop-based education, as well as critical and culturally relevant pedagogies more broadly. This article also underscores the need for more ethnographic research that unpacks the complexities, contours, and contradictions of curricula, and pedagogy that responds to the lived experiences of students.

Student Test Scores Improved in an English Literature Course through the Use of Supportive Devices

Student Test Scores Improved in an English Literature Course through the Use of Supportive Devices

The Value of Creative Writing Assignments in English Literature Courses

This paper advocates for the inclusion of creative writing assignments in English literature courses. In exploring the benefits of using creative writing activities, five key benefits are identified. Creative writing (1) dispels the awe of literature and creates active learners; (2) develops critical readers; (3) furthers student under-standing of literary criticism; (4) inspires deeper commitment to excellence; and (5) motivates class bonding and dismantles the classroom hierarchy. This paper concludes by offering suggestions and caveats regarding the implementation of such activities including a discussion of assignment design and assessment strategies.

Coming of Age as a Poet (review)

Reviewed by: Coming of Age as a Poet Chris Beyers Vendler, Helen . 2003. Coming of Age as a Poet. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. $22.95 hc. 202 pp. T. S. Eliot once remarked that the apparent purpose of Arthur Symons's Studies of Elizabethan Drama was to "expose" the reader to a "faithful record of the impressions, more numerous or more refined than our own, upon a mind more sensitive than our own." Such, one gathers, is also the purpose of Helen Vendler's Coming of Age of a Poet, a book whose thesis is really just a circular argument meant to display Vendler's sensations. I would say that impressionistic criticism works very well if you happen to be Walter Pater, less well if you happen to be Arthur Symons, and not at all well if you happen to be Helen Vendler. Three fourths of Coming of Age as a Poet collects the James Murray Brown lectures Vendler gave at the University of Aberdeen in May, 2000. In delivering then publishing these lectures, she has accepted the mantle of public intellectual. To be sure, saying something that is simultaneously comprehensible to the "public" and really worth listening to is difficult—especially since the rise of literary theory, which more often than not introduces jargon and modes of interpretation that tend to make the world of literary criticism all the more insular. Still, there is a splendid tradition of writers who fulfilled the role admirably, headed, to my mind, by W. H. Auden, who wrote in a time no less dedicated to new jargon and radical methods of inquiry than our own. Vendler's response to the challenge of speaking directly to Educated Joe Public is to deliver what are essentially Introduction to Literature lectures on canonical writers' most canonical works. There is really nothing here for those of us with advanced degrees; I suspect bright Junior and Senior English majors will not find their knowledge extended very much by what is said here. Educated Joe will likely say to himself, "I don't see what Rush and George are complaining about—English literature courses haven't changed much since I took them forty years ago." Vendler purposes to consider the first "perfect" poem that John Milton, John Keats, T. S. Eliot, and Sylvia Plath ever wrote. Oddly, "perfect" doesn't mean flawless—at one point, she asks if there is anything "wrong" with one of her perfect poems and then answers that there is (133). It turns out, a perfect [End Page 194] poem is that poem "which first succeeds in embodying a coherent, personal style" (1); it is characterized by "confidence, mastery, and above all ease." It is the poem for which "the poet comes of age as a poet to be reckoned with" (2). Such generalities can hardly be called criteria. They sound a lot like the abstractions of bad wine criticism. Her actual principle of selection is revealed when she adds that a perfect poem is "one that will become canonical within the poet's oeuvre: its imaginative powers are so characteristic and deep, and its characteristics so match them in ambition, that an anthologist or teacher is likely to choose it when illustrating the early work of an author" (2). It is bracing, in a way, to see such a bald endorsement of the canon, especially since so many of my colleagues seem to believe that a work's canonization automatically renders it ideologically suspect. Nonetheless, in this day and age it is astonishing that Vendler never even bothers to ask if her conception of the poet's "personality" is perhaps a product of the canon. Her subjective criteria allow her to discard and elevate works according to her whim, so any work which does not accord with what she considers the poet's true personality she can simply discount. And how can we tell what that true personality is? Why, by the person revealed in the four perfect poems. Such circular, a priori reasoning can hardly be called a compelling argument, but I do not believe Vendler truly believes her views can be contravened anyway. For the record, the perfect poems are Milton's...

Effects of Collaborative and Individual Learning in a Blended Learning Environment

In courses using a virtual learning environment (VLE), some students like to work together, and some do not. If we give students the opportunity to choose either teamwork or individual study, how does this affect their marks and their appraisal and assessment of the course?This question has been investigated in the context of an English Literature course at the University of Utrecht. In this course, students work intensively with a VLE, and attend lectures: a blended learning environment. Previous research has shown that the pedagogical design used provides a powerful learning environment. This time, students had the choice of working on the course assignments in small teams (2–4 students), or individually. Both groups were compared based on their study results, and the answers to a questionnaire. Students valued the choice. Mainly those students with high marks for a previous course, which had a similar pedagogical design, preferred collaboration. Statistical analysis showed that collaboration resulted in significantly better marks.

Colonial Education Systems and the Spread of Local Religious Movements: The Cases of British Egypt and Punjab

Most education in the pre-colonial Middle East and South Asia was inextricably permeated by religion, in that it relied heavily on study or memorization of religious scriptures and rituals for the purpose of training believers, or on the use of religious texts or stories to teach ostensibly secular subjects such as geography or history. Colonial penetration of these areas introduced a new model of Western education, in which the curriculum was dominated by material whose truth claims were not based on religious faith, and which were not taught through the medium of religious texts. Religion, if allowed at all, was confined to discrete classes on the topic. This marginalization or exclusion of religious material did not necessarily mean that the resulting education was inexorably secular: Gauri Viswanathan has demonstrated that British educators in India circumvented policies forbidding the teaching of Christianity in government schools by creating English literature courses designed “to convey the message of the Bible.” In contrast to its predecessors, however, Western-style education was based on the conceptualization of religion as a discrete subject separate from and incapable of shedding reliable light upon worldly matters, and on the premise that it was mastery of these worldly matters, rather than knowledge of sacred scriptures and rituals, that would bring students success. In this model, religion would be understood “as a new historical object: anchored in personal experience, expressible as belief-statements, dependent on private institutions and practiced in one's spare time.”

Attitudes of Arabic and Islamic Students to English Literature Courses at the University of Bahrain

Attitudes of Arabic and Islamic Students to English Literature Courses at the University of Bahrain

Working With Younger-Arriving ESL Learners in High School English: Never Too Late to Reclaim Potential

Younger-arriving ESL learners often come to high school ill prepared for the demands of English literature courses. Although they may have acquired the phonological and grammatical system of English with relative ease and developed a basic vocabulary, they lack the breadth and depth of vocabulary and the related concepts that are necessary to engage with the abstract nature and cultural embeddedness of literature study. In probing behind this linguistic facade, we have been able to help our students make gains in the development of cognitive academic language proficiency as reflected in standardized achievement measures of academic writing. The acquisition of the cultural capital necessary for success in literature studies, however, is more problematic. New questions arise about student identity and cultural understandings that are central to the success of ESL learners in high school.

Helping Students Say How They Know What They Know

rom 1995 to 1997, I taught in a bilingual school in El Salvador while conducting research for a master's thesis. My primary interest was finding ways for teachers to help students take control of their own learning. I believed that through reflective writing in the target language, students could become more independent learners. The theoretical framework for this research was based on multiple intelligence theory (Gardner 1983; Lazear 1991) and learning style theory (Dunn, Dunn, and Price 1975; Dunn and Dunn 1993). One of my goals was to help students discover their preferred learning styles and dominant intelligences so that they could put to use learning strategies that worked for them. The subjects for my research were tenth-grade students in a survey English literature course at Escuela Americana in San Salvador. They ranged from fully bilingual and/or native speakers of English to Spanish speakers studying English as a foreign language. Students were in heterogeneous classes of linguistic backgrounds and ability levels.

Adjunct Support for High School ESL Learners in Mainstream English Classes: Ensuring Success

The demographic profile of Alberta is changing rapidly. As the new millennium approaches, new patterns of immigration to Canada, and hence Alberta, are emerging and are forcing educators to rethink the goals of ESL instruction. The current wave of immigrants has expectations for academic success. Educational attention must be focused on programmatic responses that will ensure that ESL learners develop the level of English language proficiency necessary for academic success in high school and post-secondary study. Adjunct ESL instruction that complements the demands of high school English literature courses can result in the development of English language proficiency, and in turn academic success for ESL learners.

“If Anything is Odd, Inappropriate, Confusing, or Boring, It’s Probably Important”: The Emergence of Inclusive Acedemic Literacy through English Classroom Discussion Practices

Describes the role of class discussion and a teacher’s particular discourse moves in the development of an inclusive learning culture in a high school English literature course with a rigorous academic curriculum. Focuses on how the teacher transformed previously tracked gifted and talented and general students’ understandings of what counted as being a reader while negotiating collaboration.

What Happens When a High School Censors

Recounts events surrounding a superintendent’s decision to confiscate an anthology from a senior English literature course because of a few words in one of the poems.

A Way with Words: The Language of English Renaissance Literature.

English Renaissance literature - the plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe, the poetry of Wyatt or Milton, the prose of John Lyly - is central to all English literature courses. However, many students find their understanding hampered by changes in both the sound and sense of the language, which have taken place in the intervening centuries. This book provides an explanation of these changes, along with a detailed demonstration of how the great Renaissance writers employed language to achieve such striking literary effects. This book should be of interest to students of English literature and historical linguistics.

Is there a Teacher in this Class? English Language and the STELLA project at Glasgow University

This article describes the design and implementation of teaching software for the STELLA (Software for the Teaching of English Language and Literature and its Assessment) project. Computer-based materials for teaching Old English, Stylistics, metrics, and Renaissance lexis have been successfully incorporated into English language and literature courses at Glasgow University. We examine some of the pedagogical implications of teaching with new technology and discuss some of our plans for the future.

The Cultural Translator: Toward an Ethnic Womanist Pedagogy

First, need to say that reading writings by women of color makes me cry. What is more, the tears which roll down my cheeks into my morning coffee sustain and empower The passion gleaned from such reading experiences is what try to share in the literature classroom. Until attained this level of comprehension, university teaching had been, at some level, essentially an intellectual exercise. My opening statement is intended to inform the reader of who am and where stand politically. For those of you who have jumped to the conclusion that this is another stridently feminist or lesbian or marginal essay and is, therefore, not worth reading, let me concur that here is where you sign off. For the rest of us who are willing to suspend disbelief, the present discussion is intended to initiate dialogue and further exploration into the whys and wherefores of ethnic womanist pedagogy.' As a Chinese-American academic who has recently invaded a midwestern university campus with her own brand of multicultural connectedness, have been a shock to the local talent (i.e., the traditional midwestern Anglo students). My mere existence-not to mention my deep convictions-can be construed as a threat to students who yearn to survive English literature courses with A's and with their monolithic cultural assumptions intact. Like it or not, my presence signals change-and change equals discomfort. For the women of color who have made it this far on the academic ladder, such a position often means spiritual if not professional suicide. As the indomitable Bette Midler says in one of her comedy skits, Why bother? Since am borrowing from contemporary popular culture, might as well offer a line from the movie Ruthless People which strikes me as appropriate for the classroom situations in which find myself these days. The plot is unconventionally simple: an exceedingly nice young couple kidnap a wealthy woman (Bette Midler again!) for ransom money. After an encounter with the ferocious rich bitch victim, the young wife complains to her husband, I think she hates me. The husband replies, She's supposed to hate you; you're her kidnapper.

Editorial Review: English Studies at Toronto

E D I T O R IA L R E V IE W : E N G L IS H S T U D IE S A T T O R O N T O -Lhe beginning of all wisdom is to look fixedly on clothes, says Herr Professor Teufelsdrockh, brooding, nevertheless, about certain Gouda cows in pyjamas. Pondering the Toronto crest on my jacket with its tree and its motto, velut arbor cevo, I am bemused about which Toronto it symbolically figures forth, which twigs of the tree or rings of its bark. For me, but perhaps not for others, it summons aus der Ewigkeit University College, the Combined Department of English, and Honour English Language and Literature at their peak. I entered as a freshman in 1949 and received my doctorate in 1959, in the meantime having become a professor myself (indeed, after passing the old-style ‘general examinations,’ I must have felt that I had become, like Teufelsdrockh himself, a Professor der Allerley-Wissenschaft, or as we should say in English, ‘Professor of Things in General’) . It is not just a Thackerayan nostalgia for youth that makes me think that was a splendid place and time, nor the fact that economi­ cally it was very doubtful I should be able to be there at all and that I therefore lapped it up — though these sentiments no doubt have their weight. As Robin Harris’s new book, English Studies at Toronto: A History,* makes clear, that decade was a flowering of admirable tendencies that had been maturing in Toronto for over half a century and that would within less than another decade be wrecked and swept aside by Maoism, bigness, and business efficiency. Harris doesn’t say so. He is learned, thorough, objective, and temperate — though the occasional sentence has a faintly apocalyptic ring to it: “The English Language and Literature course was no more.” For all of us in English, and especially for those interested in what is, or was, distinctively Canadian about our teaching of the subject, this is a very impor­ tant book. As Harris’s statistics make clear, a significant number of the pro­ fessorial staff at Toronto were themselves graduates of a Toronto honour course (in 1945, two-thirds of the staff). These people in their turn, since Toronto until the sixties had the only fully developed graduate school for * Robin S. Harris, English Studies at Toronto: A History (Toronto: Governing Council, University of Toronto, 1988). xvi, 310. $25.00. E n g l is h Stu d ie s in C an ad a , x iv , 3, September 1988 English, taught a very large proportion of the people who staffed the English departments of other Canadian universities. The Toronto department under A. S. P. Woodhouse, or Woodhouse himself, was virtually the main employ­ ment agency for the rest of the country — others might use the analogy of the Colonial Office sending emissaries to man the outposts of empire. Observers less admiring of our powers used to call us ‘the dead hand of Toronto.’ As the Gargantua of Canadian universities, the sheer number of doctorates it has awarded is impressive. Between 1920 and 1984 it graduated 492 Ph.D.’s to the rest of the country’s (eighteen other institutions’) 739 — the closest was Al­ berta with 84. Toronto’s weighty presence, as supplier of staff, as model, or as bugbear, is clearly significant. Significance, as Teufelsdrockh would remind us, is not simply a matter of statistics and machinery. Ultimately it is the people, what they think, say, and write, that make a university significant. Toronto has been fortunate in them. Alexander, Woodhouse, Frye, Barker, Priestley, McLuhan, Grant, Coburn have had an obvious and powerful influence as minds in our country and abroad, not to mention those who have flourished after my distinguished dec­ ade : Wilson, Robson, Grosskurth, Leggatt, the Millgates . . . I leave off with a mere beginning of the list. At biographical interest, however, Harris draws the line. He is describing an institution, and he deals with people as they affect the institution or flourish as its ornaments. A good deal of character comes across, particularly where individuals, such as Alexander and Woodhouse...

To High School and Back: Some Notes on a Teacher Exchange

LAST YEAR I ARRANGED a teacher exchange between me and one of the English teachers in a local high school. The swap was fairly simple: during the fall semester Don Rutten, the high school teacher, was to take my freshman composition course at the University of North Dakota and help me team-teach our Methods and Materials course; and I was to take over two of his classes at Central High School, a tenth-grade composition class and an English literature course for juniors and seniors. I was going there in order to learn, from the inside, what it was like, but I had a rough idea of what to expect. Through my work with English Education I was prepared, at least partially, for the culture shock. What I was not prepared for, as it turned out, was something else, something I discovered, not about teaching in high school, but about teaching in college. And that's what I'd like to tell you about. Let me be more specific. I was leading a double life. Every afternoon, for eighteen weeks, I drove across town to Central High School where, in Room 103, I struggled to teach something about literature and composition to some fifty teenagers. Every morning I was at the university, on my own turf, doing the things that I presumably already knew how to do. One of those things was teaching a course called Introduction to Fiction, a fairly typical sophomore survey course for non-English majors. There were about thirty students, most of them pretty bright but a little awkward when they talked about literature. It was my job to keep them reading and writing and to get them talking about the readings. I had done it all before. Even the classroom was familiar: good old Merrifield 114, with its bolted-down desks, pastel walls, and pleasant view of the flowerbeds out front. Whereas Central High School seemed to pose some mysteries and raise my anxiety level, Introduction to Fiction seemed easy, safe as my own backyard. I should have know-n better, for I had been teaching long enough to know that good teaching is never easy-at least not for me. Had I not gone to Central High School-had I not been given the opportunity to look at my college teaching from a special vantage point, comparing and contrasting it to what I was doing in high school-I might have been able to preserve the illusion that what was familiar was

Getting Acquainted with a Poem

WHEN WE GO INTO A ROOMI where we've never been before, when we meet a person we've never seen before, when we read a poem we've never read before, our first need is for orientation; our first moves are to place the room, the person, the poem into the world we know. I asked students in a basic English literature course to record those first moves, to share with each other and with me their methods for coming to terms with a text. I followed the same procedure as that I. A. Richards used at Cambridge in the 1930's;1 that is, I presented the students with unidentified poems and asked them to write about them. Unlike Richards, I did not specifically ask for evaluation, but only that the student jot down what he thought was appropriate to say about the poem. The resulting write-ups are generically similar to those that Richards printed in Practical Criticism, but their range is wider, since my students were concerned with evaluation only in the larger context of understanding, of orientation. Some of the orientative strategies were predictable; others were something of a surprise. Every poem and every student presents a different pattern, as we should expect; yet, also as we should expect, typical interactions between reader and poem recur. In general, the responses categorized themselves with a neatness that I could scarcely have hoped for. The categories have at least two kinds of interest. One is, of course, pedagogic: I have found it helpful to have a more precise idea than I did before of where students are likely to begin, what questions they ask first, and what questions (obvious to me) don't occur to them. The other kind of interest is the significance the write-ups have for our understanding of literary response in general, and, still more generally, of the way minds work. The recent studies of literary response have for the most part been speculative: the work of Georges Poulet, Wolfgang Iser, and, most recently, the article by Father Ong in the January, 1975, issue of PMLA. Research studies are few: a polemical article by Edward Ducharme; Norman Holland's Poems in Persons and its sequel, Five Readers Reading.2 My inclination is toward the speculative, but I prefer, when possible,

Contemporary Drama in an English Literature Course

Contemporary Drama in an English Literature Course