Teach this!

How to spark an interest in literature among today’s students? Creativity.

1. Creative Project

The goal of the creative project is to allow students to engage with historical material–texts or images–produced during the French Revolution, or following any coherent theme or time period. In Fall 2008, my students and I were inspired by the work of Prof. Jean Dibble, a talented painter and printmaker, who joined our class to display her technique of “embedding” current and historic imagery as a way of challenging the viewer with the rich entanglement of the present and our remembered cultural past.

The creative dimension allows each student to tap into his or her own way of engaging with the material. In fact, it demands that they become personally invested in the material they learn about from reading books in a wholly different way.

Evaluation. To evaluate such projects could be difficult. But working with Prof. Jean Dibble and Ms. Amy Keenan-Amago, Art teacher at St Joseph Elementary School in South Bend, I designed an academic framework that I felt was satisfactory (although I will work on strengthening the “Working Crit” in future semesters). The evaluation process involves three important components: 1) a “Working Crit” at mid-point, where each student presents a 5-minute explanation of their concept, medium and one example. A set of evaluation rubrics is distributed in advance, and two classmates (plus the professor) provide written feedback on each project; 2) a final Round Table where the student presents a 10-minute explanation of the product, including aspects such as color, composition, integration of text/images, provenance of text/images, and the political message; 3) a two-page summaryof the project is submitted and forms part of the final grade.

Projects may include an altered book, a collage, a painting, a film, a poem, a story, a website, or a drawing. For a beautiful example from Fall 2008, see Catherine Davis’s posting of June 13, 2009: “Altered Book: “Shards of History.” (See also my own effort, a less-beautiful but heartfelt altered book posted on 5/14/09, “1789-2008: The People Want a Voice”.)

I plan to modify this project for the First-Year Literature Seminar I am teaching in Fall 2009 on “Strange Narratives,” and create a special weblog (linked to this one) for their postings. Graduate students in my seminar on “What is Modernity?” will be invited to post here, to show us how they themselves plan to revolutionize teaching in the future.

TAS session on “The French Revolution: A Cultural Approach” (Fall 2009): K-12 teachers from the South Bend area who are enrolled in the session I am offering for the “Teachers as Scholars” program will undertake a modified version of this project. Teachers as Scholars is a community outreach program that brings together university professors and area school teachers for sustained discussion and learning of cutting-edge research in a variety of disciplines. Initially launched at Notre Dame in 2000 by support from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, it is now supported by a number of grants both internal and external, and has afforded opportunities for hundreds of teachers and professors to join forces for a refreshing and invigorating series of classes.

2. The Heritage of the Revolution Today

While living in Angers as Director of Notre Dame’s study abroad program in 2001-03, I enjoyed teaching a course on the Revolution and Counter-Revolution in the Vendée for students at 2nd and 3rd year level (sophomores and juniors). To incite students to become better acquainted with their host families and other local resources, I created an assignment on The Heritage of the Revolution Today. For classes based outside France, I would provide a bit more guidance on research, such as how to do key-word searches in electronic databases of newspapers and other popular media, for example.

The assignment consists in three steps: 1) identify an example of the revolutionary heritage from a modern-day source; 2) pursue research on the artifact, i.e. consult books on the personality, event, or phenomenon in university or municipal libraries (a bibliography was provided for guidance); 3) prepare a 2-page commentary-description, citing at least one scholarly source, on the artifact and what it means for today’s audiences. Include an image or photo, if relevant.

Students found a wide variety of examples, and enjoyed this assignment very much. Their discoveries included: 1) an account of the universalist French system of national education (gleaned from a student’s conversations with French classmates); 2) a tragic account of the Republic’s persecution of Catholics in the Angers region, as relayed by the testimony of a French host family who had a portrait of a Vendéen ancestor on their dining room wall; and 3) an advertisement for a pager, using Marie-Antoinette as an example of poor time-management! (See posting of 5/16/09 on “Marie-Antoinette pager & Sans-culottes chic”).

3. Collective utopianism

Inspired by Prof. Laurent Loty (Univ. de Rennes 2), who visited Notre Dame in spring 2005, students in my class, “L’Utopie et la dystopie au siècle des Lumières” enjoyed studying a variety of literary readings on the theme (Voltaire, Rétif de la Bretonne, Réveroni Saint-Cyr), as well as the opportunity to write their own stories. The stories were then bound and shared with other students and teachers of French literature, in France–metropolitan and Ile de la Reunion–and the USA. (See list of publications in posting of 5/28/09: “Édition de fictions utopiques et juridiques,” by Prof. Laurent Loty)

For more information:

- On a “cultural approach” to teaching the Revolution, see Douthwaite, “Making History from Fictions? The Dilemma of Historicism in the French Revolution Classroom,” EMF: Studies in Early Modern France 7 (2001): 201-25.

- If you would like assignments and/or more documents related to these projects, or the syllabus of the 2005 “Utopie et dystopie” class or the 2008 “Revolution in Fiction” class, contact jdouthwa@nd.edu.

4. Read J. Willett, The Writing Class. Practice her principles, if you can.
Jincy Willett’s novel, The Writing Class has some excellent pointers for how to teach and enliven a class devoted to the pursuit of literature. Its super-sharp focus may be difficult to sustain in real life, but we’d be curious to hear from anyone who tries…

5. Crossword puzzles and Word games
a. The New York Times crossword puzzles are intelligent, well-designed, and often have a creative theme that can be incorporated in teaching. See for example the July 14, 2009 puzzle on the theme of Bastille Day, or August 11, 2009 on things French. A handy archive of puzzles with their themes and answers is available on The New York Times Crosswords in Gothic.
b. Word games, such as the Dictionary game, can also usefully complement a class discussion, especially if the book’s vocabulary or style is difficult for students. In a session on the notoriously impenetrable Jacques le fataliste, for example, I took 45 minutes or so to engage students in the Dictionary game (and lugged Le Petit Robert to class for the occasion). I gave student groups 5 minutes to scour the text in search of an unfamiliar term, then seek out its definition, which they wrote down and submitted to me, as moderator. I then presented each word to the group, one at a time, and the groups were given 2 minutes to quickly invent their own fake but convincing-sounding alternatives, which were submitted in writing and read aloud by the moderator. Each group voted on their favorite definition, and the group which convinced the most people of their fake won. Results were hilarious! It was great to be able to laugh together, and inject a sense of pleasure into our study of Jacques, which is, after all, supposed to be funny…

For examples of great student work, check out “Teach this lit! Best of ND.”