Teaching Literature in High School: Principles into Purposeful Practice

by Thomas M McCann, John V Knapp

In looking for an approach to teaching literature in high school, teachers largely fall back on the methods that they had experienced as students. These practices often involve a teacher assigning a complex work of literature and then assessing students’ reading through in-class recitations or quizzes. Teachers typically dominate the discourse and sometimes take charge of the task by reading aloud whole swathes of texts to their students. We know from our own experience as teachers, supervisors of teachers and student teachers, and researchers in the field that students are often bored with these approaches and teachers are frequently frustrated with learners’ unenthusiastic responses to the teachers’ favorite works of literature. There has to be a better way. This book offers approaches to engage students in productive procedures for reading complex texts and provides sample activities to allow learners to practice those procedures.

172 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 15, 2021

Reviews

[Gregg · Rating 4 out of 5]

The authors lay out the case for an approach to teaching literature that eschews the lecture-based, sage-on-the-stage approach in favor of something more reader-centric, but still retaining elements of the New Criticism approach. In the book's nine chapters, there are arguments for crafting lessons that do more heavy lifting preparing students for wrestling with complex texts, and they are careful to provide just as much evidence for the effectiveness of these lessons (in dialogue transcripts, activities, etc.) as they are citations for the research in cognitive science, pedagogy and other relevant disciplines that back them up.

Full disclosure; John Knapp was my methods teacher in college, and I studied his family systems therapy approach to literary criticism in graduate school. I discerned echoes of his pedagogy, stretching back to the nineties at least, in a lot of the material here, but it's clear he and McCann have been paying attention to the struggles teachers were going through before Covid, and the struggles afterwards.

The book overall opens a lot of doors into useful practices and is well worth reading.