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I'm teaching an Introduction to Literary Studies course this term, and one of the early assignments in the class asked students to create a "collage that reflects your perspective on literary study". To explain the assignment, I developed a handout that explained what collage artists think they're doing and other requirements for the task. When I passed that around the room, I projected a graphic of a collage I'd made once on the No Child Left Behind Act, and explained my creative process...reporting how I discovered the theme along the way, and suggesting that the collage still meant more than what I intended it to mean.

I was thoroughly impressed by what the students came up with for this homework assignment. Many of the students went far beyond my expectations, and I asked a few if I could share their work here.

I liked Melissa Kaufold's collage entitled "How Do You See Me?" (above), because it interestingly represented the identity of an English student, with competing voices (mostly negative) surrounding the figure -- who herself is a multifaceted construct (the four-fold face) ostensibly holding an armload of books that obscure the rest of her body. A very colorful thought balloon reveals the value in her thoughts about literature, impervious to the onslaught of negativity espoused in the "external" world; the strength of these thoughts is reinforced by the thick black boundaries lines that protect these "thoughts" from interference and keep them relatively cohesive.

The collages of the class as a whole seemed to inherently lean toward conflicts like these. In her collage, "Transcendence" (below), Julia Leksell took an artful approach to semiotics, employing negative/white space in an intriguing way that differed from many of the other collages the students created. Here, she took control over the bricolage of symbols to add her own imagery to the piece, where she portrays a dove-like ascent or emergence from what seems like a pile of abandoned and contradictory signs and symbols:

The diagonal lines in Leksell's postmodernist piece make me imagine that the pictured bird is hefting a weighty net of language, struggling but succeeding to rise. I like the positive message here.

Attempts like these to come to some cogent "perspective" on literary studies opened up the floodgates of discussion in class, and allowed everyone -- whether creative writer, journalist, or literary scholar-in-training, to participate on a fairly equal plane.

I followed up the assignment by having students swap collages and write up analyses of them. We discussed this process as one inherent to both artistic production (crafting sense out of found language and fragments) and criticism (analyzing the whole by breaking down the structure into its parts). This two-pronged approach to the assignment created a dialogue between creativity and criticism in a really successful way, I think. It both raised the question, "What is literature?" and unveiled that it is, if anything, a conversation that meaning-making demands.

[POSTSCRIPT: After posting this entry, Dr. Davis from Teaching College English asked if I'd share the guidelines. They're relatively specific to the context of my class syllabus, but I'll gladly share it here, if it helps in any way:

TV TurnOff Week (April 25-May 1, 2005) has officially begun. Do you have the guts to turn your television off for an entire week? Can you and the people you live with stand to miss an episode of your favorite show? Are you able to shun the television news and opt for the printed paper or an internet site instead? What would you do without your Simpsons fix?

I believe that television media should be studied, not blindly consumed or, alternately, snobishly scoffed at by scholars. But I love the idea behind TV Turn Off Week. One of its many aims is to try to get people off the couch and more active in their communities, their families, and their own lives. It also aims at raising literacy by showing kids the alternatives to the so-called "idiot box" or "boob tube."

I taught a course in Media & Society a few years ago, and integrated TV Turn-Off Week into the curriculum. I distributed the scary "tv facts and figures" handouts from the Turn-off Network's home page to students on the first day of class, had them read a book on Culture Jamming and later had students make posters (like those at Adbusters) and spread the word on campus, under the auspices of "service learning" and literacy activism. They did a good job. I think my favorite poster was a photoshop trick one of the students used, pointing a smoking pistol at a smashed up television screen. The campaign was only moderately successful, however, because the students could find no way to measure its effectiveness, and many of them put up the posters too late in the term. If I did this again, I'd launch the class with a more agressive campaign.

[Adbusters really takes the campaign into radical territory. Check out their advocacy campaign for TV Turnoff and be sure to check out their "TVBeGone" remote control zapper!]

TV Turnoff had mixed results, but a related and more-successful experiment we performed in that Media & Society course was a "Media Deprivation Assignment" (guidelines in Word format) which asked students to consciously "unplug" from all the technological media they use for an entire day, keeping a log about their "media fasting" and writing a reflection on the experience. I got the idea for of this assignment from a course listing I found online by Karen Cristiano which sounded like a thrilling thing to try.

They all HATED it, but learned just how saturated they are with media and how reliant they have habitually become on it. Students wrote about the sheer terror of actually hearing their car engines while they drove, or the frustrating horrors of not being able to play with their X-Boxes or the haunting sounds of other people's media that they couldn't escape from. Several admitted failure and gobbling up as much IM'ing and CD playing as they could after going half a day without them, like a smoker caving in to the cravings of a nicotine fix. I wouldn't say it changed their lives, but it really opened their eyes.

In my Freshman Composition class, we use a book called Re-Reading America (edited by Columbo, Cullen & Lisle) to generate research paper and class discussion topics. The book is a cultural studies reader, designed to get students to rethink their assumptions about American myths and stereotypes regarding race, gender, class, family, education and more.

Teaching the unit on race (aka "The Myth of the Melting Pot") is the last piece I do in our year-long sequence for the course, and it's always been the most difficult, because the students in my class -- typically about 85% white -- don't want to (or don't know how to) discuss it with the same gusto that they can talk about education or gender. More often than not, they mistakenly assert their innocence and claim that racism is a thing of the past. I always assign Shelby Steele's "I'm Black, You're White, Who's Innocent?" -- an article that calls such an assumption into question, but it's often very difficult for Freshman to understand -- and rare that a student untrained in cultural studies will be able to see their own "situatedness" in relation to cultural power. I try to teach these things, but it takes patience and a hope that raising these issues will at least cause students to rethink racism and at best set a foundation for later development of the issue in their intellectual lives.

An interesting assumption that comes out of my classes, however, is that racism is an issue only limited to blacks and whites, and often the only students in my class who aren't white are African-American. Obviously, culture is far more diverse than that. One of the best ways that I've been able to get students to think critically about race relations and talk openly about their assumptions is to focus the conversation on populations that aren't sitting in the room. Rereading America has a few articles on Native American culture that I like to assign for this purpose, especially Sherman Alexie's short story, "Assimilation." I couple this with a screening of the film he wrote, Smoke Signals, which features an all-Native cast. This not only raises issues regarding race and post-colonization culture, but also educates my students about Native American culture in general... a topic they are woefully undereducated about. Less than 1% of all Native Americans reside in the state in which I teach (Pennsylvania) -- and, at best, all the knowledge my students have about Native Americans comes from their Junior High history classes and the occassional historical reenactment or pow wow they may have attended as a tourist.

This is my long-winded way of getting to a teaching strategy I wanted to share. Before we launched into our unit on Native Americans this semster, I proctored a "cultural awareness quiz" I designed by culling questions directly from a "FAQ About Native Americans" website...designed for children. When they failed the quiz, as I assumed they would, the irony that a college-aged group were as clueless as a young child about this material really drove home the point that they could stand to learn more about Native American culture.

My intention was to use it as a way of uncovering cultural ignorance and stereotypical assumptions about indigenous peoples -- not by collecting and grading the quiz, but by having them fill it out and then discussing the answers openly as a class -- and it worked really well to begin a dialogue. Here are a few of the questions culled from the quiz:

• True or False: Native Americans often call themselves "indians."
  
• What is the difference between "American Indian," "Native American," "First Nations," and "indigenous people"? Which is the preferred term?
  
• Is "Red Man" or "Red Indian" a pejorative term (i.e., is it offensive)? Regardless, what other rude names can you think of that might offend a native people?
  
• Are Eskimos considered Native Americans? Is it offensive to call someone of that culture an "Eskimo"?
  
• True or False: Hawaiians are considered Native Americans.
  
• What's the difference between an "Indian Nation" and an "Indian Tribe"?
  

You can download the full quiz (MS Word format) with an answer key, if you'd like to use it in your own class. It isn't perfect, but it worked well for me!

Although I'm a little uncomfortable "objectifying" Native American culture by proctoring an assignment like this, I'm happy with this exercise because it really got the students more interested in the material and aware of their own ignorance. The discussion of their answers was fruitful. Hoping I've excited them enough to find the answers, I follow it up with a research assignment (based on a question they come up with in pairs). One of the jobs of teaching writing is training students in how to ask questions -- and to generate enough intellectual curiosity so that they'll persue their own answers. I might use quizzes like this more regularly to launch topic areas in my writing classes...I've always used the readings themselves to begin a trajectory of inquiry, but a quiz like this can start the inquiry where it should always begin: with what we know and what we don't.

I guess I can brag a little: last weekend, I won the Bram Stoker award for my newsletter, The Goreletter, at the Horror Writers Association conference in NYC. Although my newsletter has very little to do with teaching -- besides, perhaps, the creative writing prompts I include in each issue -- the HWA conference hosted a lecture by Tim Waggoner on "Teaching Creative Writing" which was very well attended.

[update: here's a copy of Waggoner's handout for the lecture in Word format]

A lot of writers are looking for teaching gigs (it helps to have a higher degree, of course, but as Waggoner rightly pointed out, writing is a skill and there are lots of people eager to learn it from someone who is skilled at it -- whether they have a PhD/Masters or just a few publications under their belt). I picked up a few new tricks of the trade which I thought I'd share here.

As perhaps the only other full-time teacher in attendance, I was nodding and affirming a lot of what Waggoner had to say. When asked how bad teaching cuts into his writing time, he admitted that it can really cut into productivity, but he also said that "paying bills alleviates financial stress you'd have otherwise" that would impinge on your writing. Very true. I would add that having a secure job allows me to pursue the sorts of writing I want to pursue. It gives me extra focus when I get to teach something related to my writing. I also write in the mornings, before classes. Waggoner does the same: "I write in the morning before the day to come steals it all away from me." One tip he had that I hadn't thought much about is doing snippets of writing during "between time": office hours, during student exercises, on the bus, etc.

Speaking of student exercises, Waggnoner had a lot of examples. One that I particularly liked was his notion of "being mean to a character." When young writers describe characters, they almost universally make them flat goodie-goodies who might have problems, but little psychological depth. Or they don't have enough conflict at all. Waggoner has students first write a character description, then pass that description to a neighbor. The neighbor is told to "do something mean to the character." Then they pass it back and the writer must work with the problem that's given -- often a violent one.

In another lesson, he teaches brevity. Although they're always picky about page count in essay writing, students often don't understand the need for writing tight, and sometimes roam aimlessly through a plot without thinking about what's significant and necessary -- and what's not. Waggoner brings a CD to class with the most long-winded, overtly "literary" fiction he can find and plays it to them, without any explanation. He purposely chooses the sort of stuff that would put most people to sleep. Afterwards, the lesson is self-evident: readers are impatient.

Another technique I liked: he has them write a newspaper story about "what happened" in the plot of their stories, after they've written them. This helps them to see the crux of their plots and "what's important."

Waggoner also integrates a lot of writing from personal experience into his classes, as do most creative writing teachers. He has them write about "the examined life" where they describe their earliest memories, their favorite places, and then pontificate bout what they would change. One exercise -- "write about a personal horror" -- led to his worst workshop ever, in which people began confessing all sorts of experiences and traumas...one almost drove him to the point of getting the student psychological help. I've had this experience myself, teaching "Memoir Writing" -- and yet, courses and exercises like these often do get students to tap into some meaningful vein, where the writing is as easy to mine as found gold.

If you teach writing, or if you're a writer, you might want to browse Tim Waggoner's essays online.

[Speaking of my e-newsletter: writing teachers might find my other newsletter, The Handy Job Hunter for Writers, more useful than The Goreletter. It can help with advising journalism/creative writing majors into careers.]

On Monday afternoon, I led a discussion on "Faculty Time Management" for our campus' Teaching and Learning Forum. Some of the handouts I distributed were tips for saving time in regards to teaching, scholarship, and service. They only scratch the surface in my opinion, but you can download the MS Word document if you like and see if it's helpful to you.