Tag Archives: Elbow

Elbow and Experimentation

Peter Elbow’s Breathing Life into the Text argues for a less conventional approach to the literature classroom.  In his essay, Elbow calls for more experimental and engaging activities in the reading process.  For Elbow, it is not enough for students to simply read a text and then write a response paper.  This conventional approach does not take into account the complex interactive process between the text and the reader.  If students are to fully engage the text and simultaneously develop their own meta-knowledge of reading, then a new dynamic in the classroom is necessary.

Elbow’s opening discussion about “discussions” reflects my own experience with teaching literature.  My college classes are all basic English Composition courses that feature the traditionally limited five-paragraph essay.  The course requirements do not allow a great deal of time for literature.  Nevertheless, our class reads short essays and stories to generate discussions and ideas.  When I first began teaching, I would distribute the essays and hoped for a lively discussion.  The results were similar to Elbow’s experience: random or little interaction or engagement with the readings.  After a semester or two with these results, a change was needed.

Like Elbow, I decided to experiment with different activities.  These began with simple changes, such as letting the class pick the readings or the topics, but I currently try something new every semester.  Some of these experiments don’t work at all, and many of them only work for particular groups of students.  For example, I tried an activity a few years ago that required the class to break into several groups.  Beforehand, the class had read a short essay critiquing McDonalds.  Each group was required to create a list of descriptive words or phrases describing McDonalds (this was part of a Description Essay assignment).  During that semester, I tried this activity with two different classes.  One class was energetic and argued about the depictions of the restaurant in the essay and the responses from other groups.  Thinking, engagement, and reflection were taking place.  The other class seemed disinterested and even described the activity as “silly”.

I tend to agree with Elbow.  Even if these activities turn out to be failures or yield mixed results, they are worthwhile to try.  The one thing I know from teaching is that the old practice of read and respond does not generate learning within the classroom by itself.  I find Elbow’s activity of prewriting as a form of prereading to be particularly interesting.  In future semesters, I plan to try this activity in the classroom.  The one aspect that Elbow stresses is being honest with his students.  It is vital to be honest with students.  It may appear to be “cheating” to let the students know the rationale behind a particular activity, story, or lesson; however, this lifting of the curtain engages students and makes them a part of the entire learning process.  In course evaluations, I always receive comments from students that they valued the ability to shape the learning process.

Elbow’s activity involving the rearranging of words in a text seems artificial.  Ironically, this is the exact word he uses to describe the objections against cutting-and-pasting.  In my courses, there is no consistent predictor of the success rate of these experiments.  As a teacher, the old system of trial-and-error always manages to be the basic approach.  Hopefully, as more and more teachers publish and share their experiments, educators can cover new ground and learn from each other.

Links Between Bloom, Glenn, Greene, Elbow, and Lovitt

As I digested this week’s readings, I noticed a common thread running through each chapter of When Writing Teachers Teach Literature: the writing. I’m not trying to be facetious here. It was immediately apparent from the first paragraph of each chapter that these professors taught writing. Their essays were some of the most lucid and engaging readings we’ve tackled this semester. Even Glenn’s journal-style essay held my interest and engaged me in a way that Scholes (even at his most coherent) did not.

Apart from style, the chapters also had another element in element. Each addresses the difficulties of engaging students. How to draw them in, how to hold their interest, how to get them to care (in some way) about the assigned material. But, as many of us know, it is not always enough to engage students. Students may enjoy or connect with a text and still flounder when it comes to an activity that requires original thought. From a teacher’s perspective, the other “half” of engaging students, is providing them with the tools or some method to respond to the text analytically.

But how to strike this balance? Though the teachers featured in When Writing Teachers Teach Literature vary in their approaches, they all grapple with this basic question. IMHO, the best summation this problem is articulated by Brenda M. Greene in her essay “Reinventing the Literary Work.” She wonders “how to help [students] connect with a text and yet create enough distance from it to discuss the text analytically” (178).

Because these texts are linked by this basic question, I often found myself flipping back and forth between essays as I read. For instance, Glenn’s discussion of her student Dan’s refusal to change his basic “controlling idea” (is “thesis” a bad word these days?) struck me as an example of what might happen when a student is engaged in a text, but not removed enough to apply analytical tools and craft a “valid” response to the material at hand. If a student did not really care about the text, would he not simply rework his essay to reflect his teacher’s comments?

Likewise, Lovitt’s frustration with the “missed” potential of student journals struck me as the flipside of the coin. Students, especially dedicated students, often have a hard time recording their personal reactions, questions, and revelations in journal entries. They don’t fully engage with the text—instead they read for theme or “hidden meanings” (230). Such lackluster journal entries convinced Lovitt that students simply viewed the journal entries as nothing more than “another onerous academic observation” (230).

Lovitt, Glenn, Greene, et al each offer their own solutions to this problem of balance in literary study. Because they are writing teachers, they use writing assignments to get students engaged and thinking critically.

The most appealing approach, from my perspective (as a student and an eventual teacher), would undoubtedly be Greene’s (and Bloom’s) emphasis on creative writing or “reseeing” literary texts. Because criticism and analysis can be daunting, creative writing assignments in which the writer captures the voice of a “silenced” character provide an opportunity to analyze and critique without the pressure of producing a “typical” essay. Such assignments give new (and arguably real) meaning to Scholes’s semantic-laden phrase “text against the text.”

Sara