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Teaching and Learning in Higher Education
Teaching the Literature Survey Course: New Strategies for College Faculty
Teaching the Literature Survey Course makes the case for maintaining—even while re-imagining and re-inventing—the place of the survey as a transformative experience for literature students. Through essays both practical and theoretical, the collection presents survey teachers with an exciting range of new strategies for energizing their teaching and engaging their students in this vital encounter with our evolving literary traditions.
From mapping early English literature to a team-based approach to the American survey, and from multimedia galleries to a “blank syllabus,” contributors propose alternatives to the traditional emphasis on lectures and breadth of coverage. The volume is at once a set of practical suggestions for working teachers (including sample documents like worksheets and syllabi) and a provocative engagement with the question of what introductory courses can and should be.
From mapping early English literature to a team-based approach to the American survey, and from multimedia galleries to a “blank syllabus,” contributors propose alternatives to the traditional emphasis on lectures and breadth of coverage. The volume is at once a set of practical suggestions for working teachers (including sample documents like worksheets and syllabi) and a provocative engagement with the question of what introductory courses can and should be.
276 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2018
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About the author
James M. Lang
19 books80 followersJames M. Lang is a nonfiction author whose work focuses on education, literature, and religion. His most recent books are Distracted: Why Students Can't Focus and What You Can Do About It (Basic Books, 2020), Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning (Wiley, 2016), and Cheating Lessons: Learning from Academic Dishonesty (Harvard UP, 2013). He writes a monthly column for the Chronicle of Higher Education; his essays and reviews have appeared in Time, The Conversation, the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and more.
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May 29, 2024Quote from the book:
When considering course design, it must be remembered that entry level college "...students begin university without a firm grasp on what literary argument means or entails" (p. 157).
"The use of transmediations has been a long-standing practice of mine that derives from and adapts research in new literacies studies, multimodality, and aesthetic education to reimagine the work of literature pedagogy at secondary, postsecondary, and graduate levels. As Peggy Albers notes of English teacher education programs, designing curriculum around multimodal sign systems allows teachers and students to draw upon multiple “modes of communication . . . to interpret and represent meaning” and to underscore for users of new literacies that “meaning is not located within any one mode, but in how modes are interpreted in relation to each other.” 2 When we allow students to both recognize and mobilize— to read and to create— multiple sign systems to get at their understanding of the textual, curricular, and social worlds around them, we engage them in both an aesthetic and metacognitive process, “looking through the lenses of various ways of knowing, seeing, and feeling in a conscious endeavor to change perspective on the world” (p. 215).
When considering course design, it must be remembered that entry level college "...students begin university without a firm grasp on what literary argument means or entails" (p. 157).
"The use of transmediations has been a long-standing practice of mine that derives from and adapts research in new literacies studies, multimodality, and aesthetic education to reimagine the work of literature pedagogy at secondary, postsecondary, and graduate levels. As Peggy Albers notes of English teacher education programs, designing curriculum around multimodal sign systems allows teachers and students to draw upon multiple “modes of communication . . . to interpret and represent meaning” and to underscore for users of new literacies that “meaning is not located within any one mode, but in how modes are interpreted in relation to each other.” 2 When we allow students to both recognize and mobilize— to read and to create— multiple sign systems to get at their understanding of the textual, curricular, and social worlds around them, we engage them in both an aesthetic and metacognitive process, “looking through the lenses of various ways of knowing, seeing, and feeling in a conscious endeavor to change perspective on the world” (p. 215).
Displaying 1 of 1 review