Despite efforts to make connections among disciplines and among curricular offerings, students often experience a compartmentalization of their education; we often ask them to check what they are thinking about their art history lecture at the door, and, in my American literature classes, focus solely on the literary text of the day. Such compartmentalization may help students keep their assignments straight, but it does not realistically represent how students think, and nor does it suggest the lively interrelationship of ideas implied in a liberal arts education. This essay articulates a pedagogy that I call “literature laboratories” which invite students to draw on their own bases of knowledge, and offer them places to connect what at times may seem like disconnected pieces of their education. Grounding the practice of “literature laboratories” are two premises: the first is based on John K. Noyes contention that the “real potential” for literature is “as a vehicle of diversity in what is increasingly tending toward a monoculture of knowledge.” The second considers my classroom in these courses where I use literature laboratories as environments where a biodiversity of students is a given, and the literature laboratories themselves contribute to a diverse environment of epistemology.
My lower-level American literature courses are often populated with a diversity of students who have chosen to major in a wide variety of disciplines: history, philosophy, physics, biology, as well as English. A music major, for example, may enroll in my survey of early American literature, at the same time he is fulfilling his general education requirements in quantitative reasoning with a Calculus class, social science with an introduction to sociology, and working his way through music theory. Yet such a plurality of interests often does not yield a cohesive education. Brook Thomas argues that “The notion of a piece of literature as an organic, autonomous whole that combats the fragmentation of the modern world can easily lead to teaching practices that contribute to the fragmentation our students experience in their lives--a fragmentation confirmed in their educational experience” (89). “There is nothing,” Thomas continues, “not even the literature course, that connects the knowledge [the students] gain from these different courses. For although literature is supposed to offer unified knowledge, its special brand of knowledge has been defined against the other types of knowledge they are exposed to.”1
What occurs, then, is a compartmentalization of education; we ask students to check what they are thinking about their art history lecture or biology lab at the door, and focus solely on the literary text of the day. Such compartmentalization may help students keep their assignments straight, but it does not realistically represent how students think, and nor does it suggest the lively interrelationship of ideas implied in a liberal arts education. Thus, I was interested in figuring out a way to invite students to draw on their own bases of knowledge, and offer my students places to connect what at times may seem like disconnected pieces of their education. As I sought to provide students in my literature classes a hands-on experience in the connections between literary analysis and cultural study, the laboratory model that the sciences use seemed to be a model worth exploring and adapting to literary study, both in its mechanics and its intents. Yet even more so, incorporating a laboratory component into my American literature survey courses has allowed me to explore issues of “epistemodiversity” in American literary history. As a result of formally incorporating cultural materials into my classes, I have re-grounded the literature and encouraged students to understand their education as interconnected.
Here is what I have done. Almost every semester, I teach a survey of American literature, either the first half--“new world” narratives through the mid-nineteenth century--or the second half, which spans from about 1865 to the present. These are the courses that attract the greatest diversity of students because they are 100-level (the lowest level) courses, and carry one of three required credits in the humanities for all students at my college. These surveys also attract English majors since, in combination with the British literature survey courses, they are required for the major. These details are important. As Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori explains, teaching requires an “unprecedented attentiveness to student’s work, their cultural capital, and their learning as a litmus test for the theories that inform a teacher’s approach.”2 Given the diversity of students and their fields of interest in these survey classes, I was forced to ask a question that Salvatori deems “simple but consequential”: “what does it mean for me to teach this text with this approach to this population of students at this time in this classroom?”3 These survey courses seemed to be the ideal places to alter a portion of my classroom teaching time so that the students enrolled in them could better enhance their critical reading skills by thinking through the relationship between American literary history and culture.
I first employed “literature laboratories” in a survey course of American literature from 1865 to the present, the half of the survey with which I am most comfortable. I scheduled three total laboratories during regular class meeting times--the class met three times each week for 50 minutes per session--each laboratory lasted three or four class meetings. I divided students into small groups and created a handout that detailed the laboratory, as well as various exercises for each group to assess how it was functioning. We spent part of the class prior to the beginning of the lab talking about what was expected, with my confession that they were guinea pigs since I had never tried this before. I then talked through the procedures and expectations of the lab. The students were organized into their small groups to give them a chance to get to know each other better; for the duration of the lab, they would have to come to rely on each other for information, research, and ideas.
During the semester-long class, I employed three different literature laboratories, each focusing on a specific historical moment according to a particular theme: the first lab, “Training is everything,” asked students to engage the issue of late nineteenth- and early-twentieth century identities; the second, “Moderism/s,” required students to formulate their own critical understanding of the modernist era; and the third, “In the American Society,” returned to the complex issues of identity in contemporary American culture. The class periods that were not identified as laboratories were conducted as I had always done, with a mix of lecture, discussion, group work, and short in-class writing to stimulate student responses.
I was pleased enough with the results of these first experimental labs to consider how they might be improved. Institutionalizing these laboratories one step further, and searching for a way to garner not only an additional class period per week, but a class period that was twice as long as the usual 50-minute session, I now teach the course with a specific lab component: the class meets three times per week for a 50-minute session, and one day per week with a 50-minute laboratory component. I schedule the class to meet at 2:30 p.m. on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, with the lab to meet on Wednesday at 3:30 p.m. This way, I have the option for the Wednesday class to be 100 minutes long, which allows students adequate time to work together, conduct research, and get engrossed in discussions without the threat of a short 50-minute class period. On the class schedule published by the registrar’s office, the class is listed as having a non-credit lab component, just as biology or physics have. 4 I also have added another lab that focuses on American literature and culture from the 1940-1960s (for a total of four labs) and use two of the 100-minute long Wednesday sessions for writing workshops.
I pushed for this specific language of “laboratory” for two reasons. Despite my department chair asking me why I “just can’t color in the lines” when I first approached him with this request, I actually believe that the connections among disciplines’ pedagogical methodologies and knowledges are real. Just as science courses have much to learn from humanities’ faculty about helping students to think critically, create and articulate ideas, and engage students in becoming responsible for figuring out their own ideas, so the humanities can learn from the sciences about teaching disciplinary conventions and expectations. The laboratory model is, I think, one pedagogical area that puts students in charge of their own discovery, requires that they consider possibilities and alternatives, and offers them the tools, and subsequently the confidence, to conduct their own research and come to their own conclusions. These results, another way of considering how to “teach the conflicts” as Gerald Graff argues, are, of course, also the most unsettling for my students. That disagreement about literary interpretations occurs is easy for students to understand; what is much more difficult for students is for them to embrace the differences, and come to understand that well-argued interpretive conflict is necessary, unavoidable, and even enjoyable.
The other “conflict” I necessarily invoke in these laboratory sessions is the technologically-reliant literature classroom. Although good pedagogical and critical work is being done by teachers who deliberately use technology in their classrooms--hypertext and threaded discussions on course management software, for example--literature classrooms are still viewed by many as immune to the wonders of technology, for their advantage and their detriment. Yet as L.M. Dryden argues, interactive media “unleashes formidable imaginative and creative energy to support literate activities.”5 Rather than view the use of such media as negatively confounding and disorienting, Dryden suggests it “overturns conventional expectations. . . along with assumptions that texts are fixed, permanent, and linear.”6
In order to allow my students round-the-clock access to the cultural materials used in the literature laboratories, I created online databases of the images, film clips and songs. My goal was not only to aid in the preservation of some of my more fragile materials, but also to aid viewing during the lab and to encourage students to return to the materials throughout the semester. Additionally, students are accustomed to seeking their information online; video and computer technology, Dryden offers, has a “cognitive and affective appeal.”7 These databases allow me to maintain some control over the laboratories and allow my students a means to access information with which they are knowledgeable and comfortable.
I do not include the specifics of each literature laboratory as part of the regular syllabus handed out the first day of the semester simply because of the sheer amount of information. Students do, however, have access to my web pages where the laboratories are explained, and thus, can reference it early in the semester (appendix a). In the first literature laboratory, reading, research, and critical thinking skills form the basis of literary analysis. It is important that students become comfortable with their own ideas and voice, so I ask them what they already know about identity, the topic of the lab, and some questions they are interested in pursuing.
For each laboratory, I provide a short paragraph to focus the issue, followed by a list of the literary texts (appendix b). This list of literature does not appear on the syllabus and therefore is not read for class discussion. My motivation for this is two-fold: first, I am interested in exposing students to as much American literature as I can in a short semester. Since students have access to each laboratory more than two weeks in advance, they have ample time to read the texts. Second, I use the texts in class discussion as models, not only of how to read a literary text, but also of ways to illustrate some of the important themes occurring in the literature. By the time the students enter into the first laboratory, they have a foundation of texts to which they can compare the laboratory’s texts on the basis of style, theme, or cultural response. This is one way of assisting and expecting students to become responsible readers.
Next, I provide a list of “Cultural Materials.” To be sure, literature teachers often use cultural artifacts to explain a historical period or thematic element. Yet my laboratories make such archival show-and-tell more central to investigation by students, and more formally a part of the course. In the first laboratory, students view excerpts from the PBS series on The West, and analyze a collection of images that they access during the lab from the online database. The images range from paintings of idyllic nature scenes of Native Americans from the late nineteenth century to political cartoons of suffragists to photographs of immigrants and Native Americans. Obviously, I have deliberately selected the images I ask my students to study during this laboratory, and I realize that in so doing, I narrow their possible interpretive reactions. But what I also am doing is setting up an argument about canon formation, about how cultural analyses are done, and about the ways that literary history has been manipulated in precisely the same manner, because “someone” has included one text in an anthology and not another.8
In order to provide models of how to analyze literature, I offer a series of questions for students to consider under the heading “Discussion Possibilities.” This list is by no means exhaustive. In fact, I deliberately try to keep the number of questions to a minimum in order to impress upon the students the importance of formulating their own questions and in order to allow student conversations to develop along their own interests. Because students are methodical, they often do not notice the “Discussion Possibilities” until they have already engaged in substantive and lengthy conversation about the literary texts or visual images. When they finally work their way down to the questions, many students discover that not only have they engaged these issues, but have done so on their own terms, and often have probed far deeper than my preliminary questions. They are both tacitly relieved--after all, they are asking the same questions as the teacher--and quietly encouraged--after all, they are asking the same questions as the teacher.
Finally, I detail the assignments that each laboratory requires, both individual and group work. Due dates are always after the actual laboratory; I expect the 100-minute class session will be spent in discussion and research. For the first laboratory, students write a reflective essay that incorporates their conclusions about the readings. In addition, all groups present their discoveries to the rest of the class, both of the broader, more general themes about late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century identity, as well as their specific readings of two or three texts.
For the first laboratory, I provide a worksheet as a model to help them read a literary text with distinct places for reading notes and questions, observations, and comments (appendix c). I do not require students to complete these forms--some did while others did not--but I thought the reading worksheet is a valuable opportunity to model good reading practices without creating busy work for more advanced students who have figured out their own best practices for engaged reading.
Although I circulate throughout the classroom during each lab, stopping in to listen to my students’ conversations and if need be, answer questions, after each laboratory, groups conduct a written assessment of how they and the laboratory functioned (appendix d). I offer students the opportunity to provide feedback about potential problems or personality conflicts; they are able to ask questions about the lab work or assignments, or note where they would like further instruction or information. I always ask for suggestions; even though I have crafted each lab before the semester begins, I listen to students’ comments about the laboratory; if need be, I am easily able to make last-minute alterations.
The second literature laboratory focuses on “The Modern Moment.” As I explain in the introductory paragraph to the laboratory, the challenge is in defining exactly what kind of literary movement occurred in the decades between 1900 and 1940, particularly when historical and social movements are taken into account. I want the students to engage with a variety of literary and cultural texts, some of which may be familiar to them, such as Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” to critically important, but probably unfamiliar texts like Jean Toomer’s Cane. I want them to wrestle with how to incorporate the Harlem Renaissance into definitions of modernism that more often than not describe the era according to criteria established by the white, European-influenced artistic movement. Students are given a selection of short stories to read and a diverse selection of poetry. They are asked to explore modern art, and in particular art from the Armory Show of 1913 and art created by black artists such as Jacob Lawrence; they listen to musical recordings of swing, jazz, and blues; finally, they are asked to consider some of the most famous names and ideas from this period, such as Albert Einstein or women’s suffrage.
This second laboratory’s skill introduces students to secondary source articles about literature and culture, allows them practice in reading this different kind of writing, and then expects them to engage with the critical articles by writing summaries of the argument, documenting research, and then critiquing the article’s argument. These are, of course, important steps along the way to conducting literary research, and these skills need to be learned and then practiced. I ask a librarian to conduct a short workshop on locating critical materials and I work with my students on the other steps. This lab, perhaps more than the first one, demonstrates my belief that these classes are just as much about teaching good reading, research, and writing skills as they are about American literature.
The writing assignments for this laboratory are progressively more involved: students first begin by summarizing the argument of a critical article, then provide brief comments about where the article left room for disagreement, and finally my students write an essay that captures their own reading of a literary text in the lab. For students who were more advanced in these skills, these steps allowed them the challenge of working with a difficult source, as well as the opportunity to engage with an authority figure. For those students who did not yet possess the skills or confidence to engage with a formidable critic, these steps allowed them to work deliberately, hone their reading skills, and practice the hard work of writing about literature.
The third literature laboratory asks students to focus specifically on socio-economics in the middle decades of the twentieth century. This is, to be sure, a broad topic, so to help my students better grasp some of the issues implicit in the topic, I offer them only one cultural artifact, along with American literary texts. For this lab, each small group of students watches a different film from these decades that focus specifically on class issues: On the Waterfront, Citizen Kane, and Sunset Boulevard, among others. The films I select are all considered critically important, although it the rare student who has watched even one of them (usually it’s Citizen Kane, although occasionally I’m pleasantly surprised by a student who regularly tunes in to old movies on television). I provide discussion questions for them to talk through at the conclusion of the film and I link one of their longer writing assignments to this laboratory.
Finally, in the fourth literature laboratory, what I call “The Un-Lab,” students consider contemporary American society by not only noting the culture that currently surrounds them, but also by looking backward in American literary history from the entire semester. The laboratory readings focus on a variety of American texts, ranging from selections by Frank Chin, Bharati Mukherjee, Allan Ginsberg, Thomas Pynchon, and Sherman Alexie. I also require each student to supply an American literary text published after 1970 that best epitomizes the state of the American society. Additionally, this laboratory does not provide the cultural materials but instead expects students to supply them--the “un” nature of the lab’s title. My goal is to give students more autonomy, and allow them to practice the research skills that have been introduced in the previous laboratories. The laboratory asks them to consider who constitutes American society in the contemporary era and how literary and cultural texts portray such a society. In short, these questions, like the laboratory materials, are deliberately open-ended and aim to empower students to become cultural critics after they had done the work of being cultural and literary observers.
The assignments for this laboratory ask students to locate cultural materials, create a bibliography of these sources, and then compare their own observations about contemporary society with one of the literary texts. For their group work, since this literature laboratory always comes near then end of the semester and everyone is in need of a different intellectual challenge, I assign a project to write a new version of “ America, the Beautiful,” based on what their research and readings during this laboratory suggest. To accompany their lyrics, students are asked to create a collage of images that they have found. Certainly, this exercise is invariably considered “more fun” by the students, but it requires them to consider the metaphors and myths of America against the realities, and then to distill the knowledge they glean from this laboratory (and indeed the entire course).
Each individual labs and the overall arc of the four labs, in addition, reveal a broad theme that I hope illustrates to students that the work of literary studies requires both dismantling and reassembling. In the first three labs, students are provided with the literary texts and cultural materials; their task is to analyze the texts they are given and suggests ways to read them within the historical period. That is, they are asked to take apart the texts, notice images, diction, or other literary (and artistic) elements, and then synthesize these pieces of information into a plausible and critical argument. In the fourth literature lab, the “un-lab,” students are asked to look at contemporary American literature and culture as a whole, and then find individual components that highlight the larger ideas or themes they see emerging. Then, they are asked to re-assemble those pieces into collages (both lyrical and visual). By doing so, they are engaging in the act of artistic creation, just as authors of today are immersed in culture and create art from the artifacts that surround them. In a short span of 14 weeks, my students are moved from passive readers to active dis-assemblers to critical synthesizers to creators of texts, the same progression that scholars and writers follow. Furthermore, moving students through the components of literary study--observation, disassembling, synthesizing, and creating--equips them with the skills needed to critically read texts, understand how knowledge is produced, and to experience how they influence and are influenced by the culture that surrounds them.
At the end of each semester, I distribute a separate evaluation form for the lab sections and ask students to comment in general about the literature laboratories, and then to provide feedback for each specific laboratory. One student noted that “It seemed like we didn’t move forward with any labs. We just spent time restating what we already knew.” Another thought that the 100-minute session was too long, and that 30 minutes would suffice. But overwhelmingly, students respond positively to literature laboratories. “In general the labs were beneficial,” one woman wrote, “and helped me to gain further knowledge on the topic given.” “Labs provided a change in class time from just discussing to actually doing something and putting what you’ve learned to use,” a man wrote. One woman worried about the extra hour of class time on Wednesdays, but discovered that “time went by faster than some hour classes. Seeing material presented in a different way made me remember it better and have a more personal connection to the readings,” she added. Another student commented that he is “a very visual learner,” and so labs helped him see issues that we had talked about in literature in the photographs and paintings.
Based on these comments from students, as well as my own observations, I continue to use literature laboratories when I teach the American literature survey, although I also continue to make changes. I introduce new literary texts, for example, or, depending on where our discussions are focused, offer “Discussion Possibilities” that are more attuned to students’ particular interests. This has helped me to address the student’s concern about lack of forward progress. I also occasionally interrupt laboratory sessions for several minutes in order to bring attention to a particularly astute discussion from one group, or to explain a question that multiple groups are asking. During each laboratory, I use some of these interruptions to widen the focus to the timeline of the course, so that students have to trace changes in literary and cultural representations through time in order to understand how one period often reacts to the previous one, again a way for me to show movement from one lab to the next, from one literary era to the next. In short, I have become more flexible and more demanding at the same time, and I think the students have, as well.
Despite having suggested the merits of adopting the “laboratory” model, I must admit to a rhetorical and practical contradiction in doing so, and one that, I think, must at least initially create confusion. Without a doubt, my students come into my literature class knowing what “labs” are since they are staples of science curricula beginning in elementary school. Watching the growth of a bean in a Styrofoam cup or capillary action that turns a stalk of celery with blue or red food coloring are some of our earliest memories of “doing science.” Throughout levels of schooling, however, labs often elicit student responses that range from “delight” to “absolute horror,” as Barbara Gastel notes, often owing to differences in learning styles.9 Still science labs have several important goals. They assist students in making connections between theoretical elements, often covered in a lecture, and practical or technical aspects. Students are able to practice, and perhaps eventually master, technical skills of a particular discipline. Additionally, a lab offers the opportunity to participate in scientific processes, such as observation, classification, inference, hypothesizing, and designing methods of investigation, according to R.A. Gale and J.D.W. Andrews.10 Finally, labs are valuable precisely because they allow students the opportunity to learn about science on a broad level and to do science on an intimate level. Labs require hands-on work, and students, in working through a laboratory, are learning how a particular discipline produces knowledge.
Yet there is a crucial difference between what I have termed “literature laboratories” and the “labs” that many of my same students participate in in other disciplines. In a critique of Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature (1987), Robin Valenza invokes the physical and conceptual remodelings New York’s Museum of Natural History underwent in the mid-1990s. She remembers the Museum to be composed of “a series of fusty Victorian caves where one went to see nineteenth-century reconstructions of tyrannosaurs and triceratops.”11 After the renovation, the exhibits “describe how scientists theorize about dinosaurs: what their paradigms are and how their founding premises have changed over time. There are several displays where competing hypotheses are shown side by side. Their captions explain that paleontology is often in flux because scientists disagree on how to account for particular phenomena. These exhibits give the broad outlines of what the rival paradigms are and why their proponents value them.”12
The naysayers of the Museum’s refurbishments, Valenza notes, argue that “no matter how much remodeling a science museum undergoes, it will never offer visitors the opportunity to participate in the creation of new scientific knowledge.”13 The same argument holds true for students in many science classes. Although they have weekly lab sessions, the experiments have been performed before, the results are known because the experiments already have been done, and the results will be re-affirmed because the experiments will be replicated numerous times. It simply will not work in a chemistry lab, for example, to allow students free reign with the bottles of chemicals. “They do experiments whose outcome are predetermined and will not contribute original knowledge to the scientific world,” Valenza argues: “Science education often, necessarily, keeps the students and the spectator in a subordinate role.”14
My use of the term “lab” is deliberate in that it requires students to consider the hands-on nature of my literature class and the nature of the liberal arts as cross-disciplinary work. Yet it also, I fear, suggests that our work follows the science lab form of passive observance, of experiments that have been performed before, and of already-known results. These could not be more different from what I am attempting to teach them about how literary studies is practiced.
In my literature laboratories, although each small group is working with the same literary texts, photos, paintings, or film clips, the results remain unknown until each small group produces them. Not surprisingly, each group produces different results, depending on their own responses to the materials, and an individual student’s ability to formulate an argument that prevails over her or his colleagues’ arguments. Literature laboratories necessarily allow a reader’s, or doer’s response, more so than some science labs allow for a student to move out of the realm of the spectator.
Even more so, however, I envision these literature courses with laboratory components to embody the liberal arts. John K. Noyes, in an article entitled “Teaching Literature as Aberrant Science,” argues that the “real potential” for literature is “as a vehicle of diversity in what is increasingly tending toward a monoculture of knowledge.”15 The “epistemodiversity” that literary knowledge brings, Noyes continues, can be understood “in the same terms that ecologists speak of biodiversity.”16 I am intrigued by Noyes’s formulations, and not simply because he invokes scientific methodology and praises the merits of the so-called necessary production of “useless knowledge” that science, and literature, often deliver. Specifically, I appreciate this idea of the “epistomodiversity” that literary studies offers to students who are being educated. A literary text does, after all, meld any number of cultural currents, philosophies, historical events, and personal experiences; to more richly understand such a text requires a diverse approach, as well.
Most specifically, I am intrigued by considering my classroom in these courses where I use literature laboratories as environments where a biodiversity of students is a given, and the literature laboratories themselves contribute to a diverse environment of epistemology. Yet because I teach in an English department that has resisted a move to a cultural studies focus, I cannot abandon the literary text. Nor do I want to. Rather, incorporating cultural materials into my literature classes ultimately re-centers the literary text in the literature classroom, as paradoxical as that sounds. Thomas suggests that the study of literature is, in fact, an “anchor.” “Rather than retreat to literature as the last outpost of humanism in a dehumanized world,” Thomas suggests, “we might start using literature to combat the fragmentation our students sense by making connections with other human activities they experience.”17 Because my classes are populated with students from a variety of disciplines, they bring no common methodology of approaching literature. The labs establish a structure, frame the discussions, and lead students through the elements of textual analysis. Because literature forms the foundation of the labs, students come to an understanding of its centrality in their understanding of culture. They discuss paintings or photographs in the context of literature, always relating the visual or aural back to what they have read, and, as a result, learn how to talk knowledgeably about American literary history.
Much of the teaching of literature is skills-based--we want our students to not only have a better understanding of poetry in the modern American literary period, for example, but we want them to develop and fine-tune their reading, research, and writing skills so that they can be applied to other genres or literary eras. Each laboratory over the course builds on the skills that were introduced before. Since these courses attract students who are not English majors or who are early in their college careers (first or second year students), and therefore have not yet developed the skills we expect out of our advanced students, breaking down the subject and the skills helps students succeed. Additionally, my labs do not simply include ways for students to engage in discussions of the literature, but also ask them to comment on the efficiency and efficacy of the group, build in time to talk about analytical writing, and gradually expect them to become more astute and sophisticated students of literature, particularly as they move from primary literary and cultural materials to secondary sources. This work also provides students an opportunity for collaborative interaction, as well as moments of individual discovery. In all of the work of these literature laboratories, what I hope is that my students see the foundation that literature provides, and become more attuned to the ways that the diversity of their own disciplines converse with each other.
Literature laboratories, certainly, are not the panacea for all literature courses in that they will turn the occasionally listless student in class into literary critical dynamos. But their careful inclusion of cultural materials enhances the students’ reading of literary texts and more solidly grounds the literature. They also offer a possibility of re-centering the literature course by making literature the “anchor,” to use Thomas’ word, within the diversity of disciplines found on our campuses. These laboratories have proven to be a successful way of teaching the connections among disciplines, practicing literary critical skills, and empowering students, particularly those who choose to major in a field other than English, to find a way into the field and voice their ideas about American literature.
1 Brook Thomas. “The Historical Necessity for--and Difficulties with--New Historical Analysis in Introductory Literature Courses.” Practicing Theory in Introductory College Literature Courses. Ed. James M. Cahalan and David B. Downing. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1991: 89.
2 Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori. ‘The Scholarship of Teaching: Beyond the Anecdotal.” Pedagogy 2.3 (Fall 2002): 298.
3 Ibid 298.
4 Such a listing on the course schedule has prompted students to ask if the course counts as their required laboratory credit. It does not, but there are significant pedagogical and curricular issues inherent in such a question. Is “lab” credit more about methodology and critical thinking strategies, or is it about subject matter to which such methodologies are applied? Are specific skills learned and practiced in chemistry or physics really what make the lab component, or are there broader skills that would allow labs to flourish, and count, in disciplines outside the sciences? At the very least, perhaps institutions should reflect on what a “laboratory requirement” means and be more specific about exactly what kind of laboratory, a “science lab” for example, is required in general education.
5 L.M. Dryden. “Literature, Student-Centered Classrooms, and Hypermedia Environments.” Ed. Cynthia L. Selfe and Susan Hilligoss. Literacy and Computers: The Complications of Teaching and Learning with Technology . New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1994: 283.
6 Ibid 283.
7 Ibid 292.
8 James S. Laughlin relates an assignment that accomplishes a similar examination of the literary canon debate. He asks students to collaborate on an anthology of American rock music, including a written rationale for selecting the songs, and grouping or ordering the collection. As Laughlin writes in the “Purpose” of the assignment: “we’ll be taking issue with canon formation in this class, a concern very much at the forefront of literary studies today. . . . By choosing a subject in which most of you have considerable knowledge, even expertise, I hope to reproduce some of the same concerns that face experts seeking to make selective judgments in the literary field” (247). James S. Laughlin. “Beyond Beyond the Culture Wars: Students Teaching Themselves the Conflicts.” Rethinking American Literature. Ed. Lil Bannon and Brenda M. Greene. Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English, 1997:231-248.
9 Barbara Gastel. Teaching Science: A Guide for College and Professional School Instructors. Phoenix , Arizona : The Oryx Press, 1991: 79.
10 R.A. Gale and J.D.W. Andrews. “Teaching the Laboratory.” Learning to Teach, A Handbook for Teaching Assistants at U.C. Berkeley . Berkeley: University of California, 1989: 84-88.
11 Robin Valenza. “Gerald Graff at the Museum of Natural History.” Pedagogy 3.2 (Spring 2003): 256.
12 Ibid 256—257.
13 Ibid 257.
14 Ibid 257.
15 John K. Noyes. “Teaching Literature as Aberrant Science.” Diogenes 50.2 (2003): 62.
16 Ibid 63.
17 Thomas 90.
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