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The Art of Teaching AP English Literature: An Introduction
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by Ellen Greenblatt
University High School
San Francisco , California
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Read the Full Version of this Article...
Building 'Justified Confidence'
We AP English Literature and Composition teachers -- as do all teachers -- spend most of our days juggling. We are always thinking how best to integrate concepts, ideas, and thought-provoking conundrums into the lives and work of students who alternate, often in a flash, between the highest levels of sophistication and the deepest abysses of ignorance. One moment they will be challenging the definitions of morality in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus or Morrison's Sula, the next they will be asking to be reminded about who came first, Moses or Jesus.
Our job seems clear. At our best, we enable our students to go beyond merely tolerating the inevitable ambiguities they find in literature and, of course, in their lives; we enable them to embrace these ambiguities. Simultaneously, we make them eager to write about them, to tell us and their classmates what they're thinking. But how do we accomplish this enormous task? How do we even begin? There is neither an AP English pedagogy nor an AP English reading list, which is one of the many reasons most teachers love the course. But as Robert Scholes states in his book, The Rise and Fall of English, "the one thing a curriculum in English must do... is to lead students to a position of justified confidence in their own competence as textual consumers and their own eloquence as producers of texts" (Scholes 1999, 66).
The notion of justified confidence in both their reading and writing is at the heart of excellent teaching in the AP classroom, for it implicitly poses four major questions:
- What should students be reading? What texts should they be consuming?
- How should they be approaching that reading and consumption?
- What kinds of writing will be most productive to students both in illuminating their reading and defining their own ideas?
- How can we help them recognize when their confidence in their efforts is justified?
We certainly want students to experience a high level of self-esteem about their work, but we want that sense of self-worth to be warranted. The best teachers invite students to accompany us on a demanding journey, and then we help them to prepare and to travel with us. "Invite" here is more than merely a euphemism for "assign." An invitation is inclusive: we want them to join us (and the generations before and after us) in a conversation about and exploration of literature. And if they don't know yet how to accept our invitation, then we need to show them how.
It's not, however, always so easy to join the conversation. In Philosophy of Literary Form, Kenneth Burke likens the experience of being a reader to the experience of entering a parlor where several people are engaged in heated conversation. "In fact," says Burke, "the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there," and no one, therefore, can brief the person entering late about everything that has already transpired. "You listen for a while, until you decide you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; ... the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart with the discussion still vigorously in progress" (Burke, 1977). This is the conversation that we invite our AP students to enter and leave; this is the conversation for which we must prepare them and for which we hope their other middle and high school teachers have been preparing them.
Organizing Experience and Expressing Thoughts
When bright students who are either unaware of a literary tradition and/or simply unaccustomed to the way people talk about literature enter the AP class (though they may be experts at the way people talk about computers or cars), they must learn what, according to Dennie Palmer Wolf in Reading Reconsidered, "amounts to a second language... But just like a first language, these second languages are deep-running ways of organizing experience and expressing thoughts. Acquiring them can change how a student sees the world: sometimes opening new possibilities, sometimes threatening familiar ways of knowing and saying" (Wolf, 1995). Burke's metaphor of the conversation in the parlor, Wolf's assertion that readers need a new language, and Scholes's idea of students gaining justified confidence in themselves as textual consumers and producers combine to shed some light on what exactly the AP teachers' work should be.
Perhaps an example would help here. When we teach poetry in the AP English class, students must know some terminology, and this "second language" often serves to help students to organize their perceptions and even to perceive the riches of the poem itself. When students enter into a conversation with a Donne sonnet and discover, sometimes with our guidance, how form reinforces meaning; how Biblical allusions play off against rebellion; how metaphors, with their implied tensions, mirror the competing pulls of the poem; how syntax guides us to understanding; how the change in a single word can affect denotation and connotation; then they are engaging themselves in genuine learning, merging their "second language" with their first. But how can we lead them to these discoveries without falling prey to the wry observation: "I taught a great class today. Who knows if they learned anything?"
What doesn't work in helping students to become fluent in any second language is giving them a list of terms (diction, alliteration, metaphor, metonymy) to memorize and then asking them to show that they "know" the terms by giving them a quiz. In fact, quizzes in the AP class are tools of last resort, effective only as a stick with which to prod laggards to keep up with the reading. The act of taking a quiz does not involve learning for anyone, teacher or student; it merely involves regurgitation on the part of the student and mind-numbingly boring work in correction on the part of the teacher.
Engaging Students Through Questions
Questions -- the kinds with no preset answers, the kinds that open discussions and arguments, the kinds that invite everyone into the conversation -- should be the basis of the AP English class. But questioning doesn't mean the AP teacher standing in the front of the room directing "who, what, how" inquiries at a classroom filled with passive students who know that all they have to do is volunteer to answer one or two every class or so in order to gain the right to snooze the rest of the time. AP teachers must make sure that their students learn to ask more of the questions, of each other, of their teachers, and ultimately and most important, of themselves. Experienced teachers know that students often already know answers; they simply do not know how to ask themselves the questions that will elicit what they have already discovered or may yet discover.
A specific approach that almost always evokes initial resistance and subsequent surprise and pleasure is the question paper. Here students must write a page or two, in paragraph form, about the text they are examining. The trick is that every sentence must be a question. So, for example, if they are confronting John Donne's "The Flea" (always a winner with students) for the first time, they must come to class having read the poem carefully and with a paper of questions. When students approach their task, they cannot imagine how a paper of questions will be anything more than a disjointed and literal list: "Why is he writing about a flea? Is it a man or woman talking, and who is he talking to?" As they write, however, their questions start building, one on the other, and the questions become, increasingly, speculations about meaning, hypotheses about imagery patterns and their intention, contemplations about possible irony and sexual innuendo. "Why does he use the word suck twice so early in the poem and then again at the end? Isn't the diction level of that word lower than the rest of the poem? Is he (I'm pretty sure it's he now) trying to convince the woman? Are they in bed? Why doesn't the author alternate his voice with hers?" In effect, they wonder themselves into the authentic beginnings of understanding before they even come to class, before a teacher has posed a single question to them.
The question paper is, of course, only one technique to engage students, and, as with even the most effective tools, it loses its potency with overuse. It does, however, show the efficacy of having students come to class after they have begun to articulate their bafflement or to write themselves into the beginnings of understanding. Another technique AP teachers use is the reflection paper or thought piece. These assignments are meant to help students to focus on a question, an issue, a stanza, a line, a word, or anything that strikes their interest in the reading assignment. Though they are informal "writing-to-learn" assignments and they are not meant to be revised, they might well become the basis of a later, more formal writing assignment. Teachers can have all students write thought pieces on a given day and then have them hear others' reflections, either as a whole-class or small-group activity. Alternatively, teachers can have two or three students write reflections for each class and use these reflections as opening gambits for whole-class discussion. Students who know they will be reading their reflections to all their classmates as opposed to merely submitting them to the teacher tend to see the writing stakes as considerably higher.
Student-generated opening gambits like the question paper and thought pieces have several advantages: students, rather than the teacher, set the terms and questions for the discussion; the caliber of students' writing tends to be better since they know they are writing for a larger audience; discussions are more likely to be among students with the teacher's participation rather than dominated by the teacher. Students who come to the AP class having read, thought, and written about the assignment can feel justifiably confident about participating.
Works Cited
Burke, Kenneth. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. University of California Press, 1977.
Scholes, Robert E. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English As a Discipline. Yale University Press, 1999.
Wolf, Dennie Palmer. Reading Reconsidered. The College Entrance Examination Board, 1995.
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