ON COURSE

Back to High School

An assistant professor of English finds radical new sources of inspiration for his discipline in K-12 classrooms

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By JAMES M. LANG

For a few days every spring semester I find myself displaced from my comfortable academic territory into an environment that I tend to find confusing, chaotic, and a little scary: a high-school English classroom.

This annual displacement occurs because my college does not offer education as a stand-alone major; instead, students here concentrate in education while majoring in a content discipline of their choice. So we have many English majors who are also education concentrators and who will put their English degrees to work in their own classrooms after they graduate.

Students who elect to concentrate in secondary education spend the second semester of their senior year as student-teachers at a local high school, where they are observed by a faculty member in education and one from their major. So each year I observe and evaluate one or two English majors as they are cutting their teeth as teachers.

I have noticed over the years that my interactions with student-teachers, and with the high-school teachers who open their classrooms to our majors, tend to rest on an assumption shared by all of us: I am viewed as the "expert" in the field in which we are all toiling, by virtue of my advanced degree and my exalted position as an associate professor of English literature.

That assumption rests on an even more foundational (but usually unspoken) assumption that I — and my colleagues in college and university English departments — determine what counts as knowledge in our field. High-school teachers will sometimes ask me, for example, whether certain novels that are common fodder in high-school English classrooms, like The Great Gatsby or The Pearl, are still considered important works for students to read.

Students, likewise, will sometimes ask me in my "Introduction to Literature" courses why we never read popular authors like Stephen King and always have to keep reading Shakespeare. In my more advanced courses, they want to know why we don't read the New Critics anymore, and instead focus on New Historicism or Postcolonial critical theories?

Who decides, they want to know, which novels, poems, and plays are considered great and timeless, and which ones are considered trash? Who decides which theories are the dominant ones of the day?

When I hear that question I like to give a big smile, puff out my chest, and reply, "I do."

Of course I usually go on to explain what I mean by that flip response — namely, that the canonized literary works, and the critical methods used to analyze them, are largely determined by the experts in the various subfields of a discipline who spend their lives studying and teaching the works. With some notable exceptions, the books and ideas that survive long after their popularity has waned in the public sphere are the ones that keep making appearances on course syllabi and in scholarly essays and books on the literature and history of England and America.

I will confess that I hadn't thought to question that foundational assumption until I had the chance to review a manuscript this past spring about the gap between English departments and education schools, and about who decides what gets taught. In November, I spoke on a panel at the annual convention of the National Council of Teachers of English with the author of that now published book, and I was reminded of the broader questions his work raises for those of us in higher education.

The book is Deranging English/Education: Teacher Inquiry, Literary Studies, and Hybrid Visions of 'English' for 21st Century Schools (NCTE Press, 2008), written by John A. Staunton, an assistant professor of English at Eastern Michigan University. It emerges from the perspective of an academic who has led a hybrid existence on the borders of English literature and educational theory. Staunton has a Ph.D. in American literature from Fordham University and an Ed.S. in language and English education from Indiana University. He has taught in both English departments and education schools (sometimes, he noted to me in our e-mail conversations, at the same institution).

The impetus for the book came almost a decade ago when Staunton was working as a visiting assistant professor of English at a small college in the Midwest. "A number of the English majors I was teaching," he explains, "were also seeking certification as secondary-school English teachers. Over the course of the year I became increasingly puzzled and frustrated by the apparent inability of students and faculty alike (myself included) to put their work in literary studies and their courses in teacher education into what seemed like an authentic dialogue."

In other words, the students were English majors in their English courses, and education majors in their education courses, with very little crossover. When they stepped into their roles as future teachers, they left behind the theories and ideas they discussed in English courses. Derangement is the term Staunton uses to capture the experiences of students as they bounce back and forth between their education courses and their major courses. "I guess I'm trying to capture more of the original French sense of the word," he says, "where it means something more like 'unsettling.'"

That observation led Staunton on a long journey over the next six years, doing research and collaborating with teachers at every level, from elementary school to graduate school, trying to understand the relationship between literature and the classroom — and by extension, to understand what counted as knowledge in English classrooms, and who determined that. The result of his research is Deranging English/Education, which is structured as a series of case studies in which a wide range of teachers experiment with core texts in American literature and think both about the literary texts themselves and about what it means to teach them.

His first case study, for example, follows the journey of a single poem — William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" — through classrooms at every level of education, from elementary school right through graduate seminars. The journey is a shared one, as Staunton describes a collaborative enterprise between multiple teachers who joined him in teaching the poem and then talked about their experiences in person and through written analyses.

The multiple uses to which the poem was put in these various classrooms was eye-opening. Various teachers used it, Staunton says, "as a grammar lesson, an artistic representation of literature, an exchange of ideas used as verbal restructuring, and as a lesson in valuing the originality, uniqueness, and previous knowledge within each student."

Not one of those teachers taught the poem in the way that a specialist in 20th-century American poetry might handle it in a graduate-literature seminar. And yet each teacher found the poem an extraordinarily useful object for teaching some kind of lesson. And each one of the teachers he describes took away some valuable new perspective on literature, and on the teaching of literature, from students' ideas about the poem.

Staunton uses the case studies to question the basic assumption that determinations about what counts as knowledge in a field should proceed in a top-down manner, starting with faculty members in higher education. His research argues for a more-expansive vision of the process of creating and authenticating knowledge in our fields.

For although many of us may claim to have learned valuable lessons from our students, I'm guessing that most of us have not really embraced the kind of expansive vision Staunton describes. We may welcome the specific insight of a student into a particular text, or I might pick up a new idea or two about a familiar text from observing a high-school classroom. But generally, after such experiences, I head back into my own classroom and conduct the course exactly as I always have, with my same assumptions in place about the purpose and scope of literary studies.

Staunton's book argues for giving undergraduates and teachers from elementary and secondary schools a stake in defining what constitutes our disciplines. Instead of seeing the work of a higher-education expert on William Carlos Williams as the font of truth from which K-12 teachers should draw inspiration and ideas, we might see the expert's perspective as simply one point along a continuum of uses to which we put a Williams poem in our classrooms. Some teachers use the poem to provide a better understanding of Williams and his contemporaries; some use it to get students to think more deeply about English grammar; some use it to inspire students to create their own poems.

But each one of those uses provides a different inflection to the field of literary studies, and each one of them might open a teacher — even a faculty expert teaching a graduate seminar on Williams's poetry — to a different way of helping students construct their own understanding of the poem.

That is precisely what happens to Staunton in subsequent case studies in the book: Each time he opens himself up to the perspectives of his students or fellow teachers on familiar literary texts, he finds himself engaged and enlightened by the texts in startling new ways. His work suggests that we, too, might find radical new sources of inspiration and understanding of our disciplines, and our most familiar texts and ideas, in the unlikely locales of elementary and secondary classrooms, and in the voices of our own students.

We won't hear those voices, though, unless we are willing to acknowledge our disciplines as shared territories.

James M. Lang is an associate professor of English at Assumption College and author of On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching (Harvard University Press, 2008). He writes about teaching in higher education, and his Web site is http://www.jamesmlang.com. He welcomes reader mail directed to his attention at careers@chronicle.com. For an archive of his previous columns, see http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/archives/columns/on_course.