While there has been a great deal of debate about enlarging the canon, less attention has been paid to how students respond to "new" literary figures such as Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich, or to how instructors should incorporate them into an already cramped literature survey course. Instructors must consider some questions that…

"Farewll to Manzanar" (Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James Houston), autobiographical account of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, might be used in a writing class to help students think deliberately about race and ethnicity. Writing about the book and researching the history surrounding it could serve to…

To ask students to write and respond to each other's papers is one means of confronting the difficulties posed by radical texts such as Adrienne Rich's "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision," an essay from her collection "On Lies, Secrets, and Silence." When an instructor assigns such a work, he or she places him- or…

To determine what general aspects of photographs appeal to readers--as opposed to subject matter categories that might or might not be tied to events--95 college students reported their readership of three alternate front pages of the daily student newspaper. Specifically, the study examined whether readers were more likely to read stories…

A course on detective fiction proved to be very popular at the University of Michigan, Flint. Fifty students signed up for the class, which was supposed to be limited to 45. Surprisingly, though, only 10 of these identified themselves as readers of detective fiction; those remaining were mainly curious. The course featured a range of works…

Whatever the view an educator takes of collaborative learning, it does seem that it takes a lot of class time. However, computer networking capabilities allow for all the advantages of collaborative learning without requiring the instructor to devote large blocks of precious in-class time to encourage it. Five good ways to use networking…

Suggesting that teaching the literature of the Vietnam War can enliven literature study in the middle and secondary school classroom, this paper explains why this literature can have such a powerful impact on students, and how teaching it fosters students' responses to literature. The paper begins with a discussion of why students should study and…

Shakespeare has brought alive Western society's shared history and culture in a way no other playwright has ever done, and it is his relevance that makes reading his works worthwhile. Community college educators can prepare the citizens of the future to assimilate population trends and technological advancements by giving their students the widest…

The elements of design (line, shape, color, value, and texture) are the artist's lexicon rather than words, and the meaning of these elements is carried in their expressive properties in picture books as well as in paintings. Line can convey repose when horizontal, stability if vertical, and action when diagonal or curving. The element of shape…

Reader-response journals were successfully employed in a "Reading Shakespeare" course for non-majors, making literary tradition accessible to students untrained in classical rhetoric. Students were encouraged to employ any combination of four approaches. First, students were invited to ask questions about the language, sequence of…

An instructor teaching a 20th-century fiction course was surprised by her students' response to a series of stories she asked them to read about the South. Apparently representing the feelings of many in the class, one student said, "These people are weird. And we don't like them." Though they were used to encountering differences in…

Suggesting that literature dealing with the Vietnam War can have a dramatic impact on students, this paper assists teachers in selecting young adult literature on the war, discusses a variety of assignments, and presents student responses to the literature. The paper begins with a discussion of the three main types of young adult literature:…

Yale's Cooke Teaching Program is designed to diminish the sense of imperviousness and immobility that the university often conveys to its surrounding community. During the academic year, one Yale graduate student attended a high school senior honors English class twice weekly. It was an advanced class (mostly minorities), many were college-bound,…

The autobiography "I, Rigoberta Menchu" is a complicated text--the conditions of its production, the complexity of its subject matter, and the wide range of possible responses among North American readers create challenges for composition students and instructors. A week of taped interviews with Rigoberta Menchu, a Guatemalan Indian…

A study examined how at-risk readers constructed meaning while reading, writing about, and discussing a full-length novel during Transactional Literature Discussions (TLD). Subjects were six fifth-grade students, four males and two females. Students chose the novel and participated in 15 group sessions of 45 minutes over 8 weeks. Scaffolded…