It is a beautiful thing when assigned reading for a class becomes a joy to accomplish. That’s how I felt yesterday reading Peter Smagorinsky’s Teaching English Through Principled Practice (2002). I’m a nerd, I admit it.
Smagorinsky advocates for the use of conceptual units in the teaching of English – centering each three-four week unit of study around a central theme, question, historical period or other cohesive subject, and then developing assignments that allow students to engage that theme or question in a variety of ways. Not brain surgery, but he offers practical insight gained through years of in-the-trenches experience.
He also suggests that teachers spend significant energy considering the ways in which student interests differ from their own. In other words, most of our students won’t be book-loving nerds like us. Again, not brain surgery, but it’s easy to gloss over this fact instead of spending time to understand what it will take to engage student interest in reading.
I found one of Smagorinsky’s questions especially useful. He asks, “What do you think makes something literary?…What do your students think makes something literary?”
As an avid reader (I just finished Khaled Hosseini’s Ten Thousand Splendid Suns and am now in the middle of Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen), I tend to abide by the “I know it when I see it” mentality. But as I sit with Smagorinsky’s question, I’m realizing it’s an important one to consider before I dare suggest that my students read anything in particular.
Any thoughts on what makes for a work of literary merit?
- Rachel Bowers
To some extent, I’d say that’s a subjective question, and in doing so agree with the idea that it helps to know one’s students. More generally, I’d point to subject matter that evokes timeless themes, investigates the human condition, observes changes in characters and circumstances in light of their encounters with these forces, and makes use of language and other literary devices in imaginative and novel ways. In short, the work moves beyond the realm of entertainment; it makes the reader think; it starts a conversation.