Conference Review
Review of Liberlit 4 Conference
Mary Hillis
Kansai Gaidai University
The fourth annual Liberlit conference was held on Friday, February 15, 2013,at Meiji Gakuin University, Shirokane Campus, conveniently located near
Shinagawa station in Tokyo. According to the Liberlit Manifesto (2013),“LIBERLIT is an ongoing, constantly developing forum in which we canestablish how, where, and why literature should rightly figure in Japan’s English
curriculum.” The 2013 conference theme, Only Connect: Teacher, Student, Text,
inspired participants to consider ways to engage learners with various forms ofliterature. The conference program showcased presentations on novels, graphicnovels, short stories, poetry, drama, and TV series. As a result, I was eager toattend this conference and discover reading selections and activities that I might
be able to use in a literature themed course that I teach at my institution.
After arriving at the conference site, the registration process was simple.
Participants could pre-register online or on-site and the fee for the one-day
conference was reasonable: 3000 yen for teachers and 1000 yen for students.
The registration staff members were friendly and helpful. The conference wassmall and the proximity of the rooms allowed for socializing with colleagues
and meeting fellow conference-goers. The conference venue consisted of fourpresentation rooms, a refreshment room, and a central lobby area. At 10 a.m.,the conference began with a welcome message from the conference organizers,
Paul Hullah and Michael Pronko. Then attendees could choose from concurrent
sessions, with three to four 50-minute sessions occurring at once.
The first concurrent session that I was able to attend was “Teaching LangstonHughes” by Hugh Nicoll. He used audio recordings and his own dramatic143

Hillisreadings to demonstrate the rhythm of Langston Hughes’ poetry. He also led aninteresting discussion about the poems which allowed the audience members achance to discuss their own ideas, interpretations and experiences, greatly adding
to the value of the presentation. He also proposed how to introduce the poems
to Japanese students. Suggested poems included “One Way Ticket,” “Peace
Conference in an American Town,” and “Theme for English B.” Nicholl’s passion
for these poems came through in his presentation.
The plenary address, “Reading Classic Novels in Language Classrooms” wasdelivered by Yoshifumi Saito, Professor of Education in the Graduate School ofEducation at the University of Tokyo. His enlightening presentation reviewed
the chronology of literature in the language curriculum in Japan from the Meiji
era to the present. In the second half of his presentation, he demonstrated how
excerpts from the print and film versions of Jane Eyre and Wild Sargasso Sea canbe used in the classroom for both language and literature oriented activities.
After lunch, I attended a session entitled “Highlighting Culture in Literature
through the Culture-Clash Paradigm” by Scott Bean. Bean described how
he highlights cultures in conflict in the following novels: The Giver, Fear andTrembling, Farewell to Manzanar, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,and The Pearl. He also uses the graded readers Brave New World (Penguin) andThe Scarlet Letter (Oxford Bookworms). He read sample passages and discussion
questions that he has used in class to draw students’ attention to the topic ofculture, thus deepening their understanding of the characters, plots and themes.
Next, I attended “A Full Year Course in Poetry for Learners at All Levels” byJohn Rippey, poet and teacher. He shared his elective poetry course that covers avariety of 20th and 21st century American poetry and includes works by authors
such as Jean Valentine and Lucille Clifton. This course involves two cycles: theReading-Response Cycle in which students read and discuss poetry and theCreative Writing Cycle in which they recite, write, and translate poetry. He also
shared his school’s literary journal, SOAR!, to which his students contribute their
original poetry, and the results of his students’ course evaluations. Both of these
artifacts provided concrete evidence that a poetry-based curriculum can be wellreceived by students, and this inspired me to incorporate more poetry in my144

Review of Liberlit 4 Conference, OnCUE Journal, 8(2), pages 143-146

literature classes.
The next presentation I attended was “Using Drama to Connect Students toLiterature” by Frances Shiobara. She explained how to use drama in connection
with short stories to increase the depth of understanding. Shiobara uses shortstories selected from Lucky Luke and other Very Short Stories by Paul Stewart, Tasteand Other Tales by Roald Dahl, and New Yorkers, from the Oxford Bookworms
series. In order to complete the drama tasks, the students need to reread the story
and think about the characters more deeply. In addition, the drama activities
are memorable and enjoyable for the students. She uses drama activities, such as
miming, puppet shows, role- plays, and skits. Audience members participated ina variety of activities, such as using facial expressions and voice to show emotion
and feeling, which allowed us to experience the drama tasks from the students’point of view and perhaps understand students’ feelings of engagement orreluctance for the tasks.
The final concurrent session I attended was “Using a Novel to Facilitate
Critical Thinking” by Patrick McCoy. He discussed how to use critical thinking
and novels, such as Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Great Gatsby, The Old Man andthe Sea, and Animal Farm. He uses activities that correspond to various levelsof Bloom’s Taxonomy, such as quizzes, discussion questions, and small grouppresentations on the novel’s themes to engage students. Because I teach The Great
Gatsby in my class, I was pleased to find new ways to approach the book.
There were plenty of other presentation titles that looked interesting:“Smartened-Up Literature: Can the Graphic Novel Take Comic Books toLiterary Heights?” by Sean Chidlow, “Teaching Global Literature in English” by
Ian Lambert, “A Frakin’ Good Tale: Using Battlestar Galactica to Teach Academic
Discussion in an EAP Program at a Japanese University” by Patrick Judge, and“Selecting Japanese Literature in English Translation to Use: Yukio Mishima’s
Swaddling Clothes” by Cheena Fujioka. It can be seen from the presentation
titles that a variety of texts are being used in Japan.
To conclude the conference, “Lightning Discussion, Any Other Business,Concluding Remarks” were given by Michael Pronko and Paul Hullah. They
invited comments on the conference and encouraged conference participants to145

Hillistake an active role. They introduced further initiatives that may be undertaken by
the Liberlit movement, such as conference proceedings, a journal, and an online
resource center. More information can be found on the Liberlit Web site (http://www.liberlit.com)
Overall, the Liberlit conference is worth attending. It is a small, specializedconference, so all presentations are directly related to the teaching of literature,mostly at the tertiary level, and the presenters’ passion for the written word wasevident. Although three to four concurrent sessions made it difficult to decide
which presentation to attend, if you are interested in literature, then you will notwant to miss this chance to meet like-minded colleagues and discover new waysof using literature in the language classroom.

References
Liberlit Manifesto. (2013). Retreived from http://www.liberlit.com/liberlitmanifesto.

Author Bio
Mary Hillis is an associate professor in the Intensive English Studies Program
and the director of the Writing Center at Kansai Gaidai University. mhillis@
kansaigaidai.ac.jp
Received: October 10, 2014
Accepted: October 17, 2014146