When Literature Is Evangelical: Pedagogies of Passion

In this paper, based on a presentation I made at the 2010 Annual CIT (Center for the Improvement of Teaching) Conference held at UMass Boston, I will describe two activities that I use each semester in Expository Writing 101 at Bentley University. The two activities are almost totally unrelated, but the advantage of discussing them together is that they potentially shed light on certain beliefs I have about my subject, the advantages of teaching that subject with passion at the forefront, and the urgency of recognizing that one's pedagogy must adapt when one's field--and right now, I'm speaking of the field of literature in English--is endangered and in crisis. Though journals, books, and conferences have exhaustively identified the problems I am alluding to here, the coherence of this discussion still merits and perhaps even compels a brief and very general review. Within the academy, the humanities in general and languages in particular, have been endlessly handicapped by the various ways in which our work is discredited by the larger culture, for reasons so varied that they even begin to contradict one another. For instance, unlike medicine or the law, students sometimes disregard English professors because the field is not seen as challenging. They tend to believe that the study of literature involves just sitting around and talking about books and what they mean, which anyone can do. ("Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach.") On the other hand, these same scholars are discredited when their work becomes an internal theoretical dialogue, seen as a deliberate gesture of exclusion, a private and hyperintelligible and therefore unintelligible conversation among overeducated people with too much free time. And in the current economic climate, where everything expensive is expendable, there is an ongoing necessity to demonstrate one's usefulness. Sadly, we live in a material culture, not a spiritual culture, and that materialism has a firm grasp on all social institutions including higher education. Contemplation, self-reflection, deep thought--these practices are seen as borderline irresponsible in a society where people have no homes, no food, no medical care. The fact that people are now literally screaming at one another at town hall meetings should be an opportunity for us to recognize that the study of language, texts and contexts, is needed more than ever. (1) Meanwhile, as we charge forward into the technological age, the question of whether or not books and newspapers will even exist in ten years gives a subliterate public further fallacious reasons for downsizing the babies with the bathwater in a variety of industries tied to "old fashioned" publication. My challenge, then, is to use the space of the classroom to share the reasons why books still matter to me personally, despite the fact that my relationship to them is "professional" in every sense. Presently, I will give an overview of the two teaching activities that are the subject of this paper before discussing the philosophies behind them. But the impulse behind both activities is to connect the professional to the personal through my own passion for language, a passion that I know can be taught because it was taught to me. For Expository Writing 101 "Lab," a double-length class (160 minutes twice weekly), I have designed an activity for which we use a couple of class meetings simply for reading and writing in silence. (2) Students at Bentley are placed in lab sections when they have been identified as needing more sustained instruction in reading and writing, based on test scores and other diagnostic instruments, giving us a unique opportunity to engage in what amounts to a monastic experience with this two-part activity. I also create a discussion board forum where, after completing the Read-In and the Write-In, the students post messages describing what they were reading or what they were writing, and how they felt about the experience. …