Strategies for Teaching Literature with Student-Selected Texts

I experimented with this method first in a literature survey course, adapting a structure Angus Fletcher was using with MFA students. I’ve since adapted the method for three different courses. You can peruse the assignments in the Assignments in Context section of this book; I hope this organization illustrates how this method could be adapted to many types of courses, including a course focused on a specific genre or literary movement. The trick to eliminating the reading list is figuring out how to help students find “new-to-you texts” in the period, genre, movement, or author demographic being studied.

Frame the course as a research project

It is powerful to introduce students to literature as a technology that humans invented to respond to environmental problems. As they work to classify their experiences, students will learn about narrative technologies that they didn’t realize were at work in their favorite books and films. This empowering approach to literature is made even richer when we show students how their own experiences and hypotheses can contribute to the growing field of story science. Students have an opportunity to expand how scholars understand literature if they work hard to articulate their genuine reactions to real reading.

Help students set goals for the semester

I’ve realized that goal setting is an important first step when giving students more autonomy. Students wind up in our courses for all sorts of reasons, and they of course all have their own life and career goals. I like to encourage students to think of a literature course as an opportunity to encounter texts you wouldn’t choose on your own (“new-to-you texts”). When you’re given an opportunity to choose what you will read, you can decide to challenge yourself in a range of ways. This might mean tackling something that is unfamiliar and a little intimidating. It might mean reading everything you can find that uses a particular technology to better understand how it works. Or perhaps it means exploring texts that have prompted experiences associated with specific psychological benefits. I like to have this conversation with students after I describe the unique features of the course during the first class meeting.

Embrace creative writing

The assignments inspiring this course asked students to identify a literary blueprint and then try to use it themselves. I have tried to imagine ways for students to do these things in a literature course. I did these creative assignments alongside my students even though it was uncomfortable at first (I’ve never fancied myself a creative writer). After one semester of these experiments, I found myself thinking in terms of story as much if not more than argument. When I tried to write an introduction that would get students excited about selecting their own texts, I found myself imagining a transportation hub—The Station—where travelers can go wherever they want, whenever they want, by whispering the location into a window (see “Welcome to The Station”). And as we created WonderCat, a discovery tool that grows with each new story experience entered, I imagined a shop inside that station where employees help people search through huge card catalogs of travel experiences to find new places to visit—for free (see “Introducing WonderCat”).

Share your love of literature (but don’t expect students to appreciate the things you love)

It can be challenging to share enthusiasm for something you love with students who are uninterested (or looking at their phones…or sleeping). There are lots of approaches to this dilemma. I have colleagues who see it as a challenge and give a compelling performance for their students, arguing for the brilliance of the authors they’ve assigned (even, or perhaps especially, when they suspect students haven’t read). But I’ve always struggled to convey my enthusiasm when I can tell students aren’t into it. This changed dramatically when I started offering my own reading experiences as a model for what I wanted students to do with their chosen texts. I was able to describe the details I noticed without fearing that I would read them regurgitated back to me in an essay later in the semester. More importantly, because I didn’t feel the pressure to convince students to share my appreciation, I found myself sharing more and connecting with my students as a fellow reader. This became a rich antidote to the demoralizing experience of disengaged students.

Model the work you want students to do

Before giving each major assignment prompt, I did the assignment myself, drafting a new post about a text I was experiencing for the first time. This was time consuming, but I honestly think it was one of the most impactful choices I made. The first time I did this, I created a post about literature I had already read and wanted to tell students about. But, when I realized that I wanted to show students how I work through confusion while reading and uncertainty as I process my experiences, I shifted to chronicling my experience reading something new. I was introducing them to literature they might never read, and they were nevertheless curious about what it was in the text that prompted my experience (they even helped me get more specific with some very thoughtful questions-check out the insightful comments on my post about The Terror).

Ask students to start with something they already know

The strategy of teaching literature with student-selected texts is unfamiliar and can be a bit overwhelming for students at first. It helps tremendously if students get started by thinking about a story they’re already familiar with. Each of the courses outlined below begin with a “getting started” assignment that asks students to identify stories that they’ve returned to repeatedly in their lives. In addition to allowing them to get started right away (that is, before they’ve read something new), this assignment helps each student identify specific experiences and narrative technologies that might inform their reading choices for the rest of the semester. Even if you want students to focus on written texts for the semester, it’s helpful to leave options open for the first assignment (let students choose a text, film, game, song, etc.).

Structure discussion around features that will be present no matter what is chosen

As I imagined teaching with this method, I anticipated (and mourned) the loss of class discussion. Though my class discussions weren’t going the way I hoped they would (very few students were coming to class with observations to kickstart discussion), I still wanted students to learn from each other. I was delighted to discover that it is absolutely possible to have a discussion about literature when students have read different texts. I have structured assignments around elements of narrative (storyworld, plot, character) specific genres (text, moving images, sound, etc.), and specific representations (predators, invasives, natural phenomena). I find the learning much richer with this shift of focus. We get a much better collective understanding of these elements, students take ownership of the creative works they bring into discussion, and everyone discovers new creative works they want to experience in the future.

Curate possibilities (students don’t know what they don’t know)

After my first semester teaching with this method, I realized that eliminating assigned reading left some students a bit stuck when it was time to decide what they would read. I dreamed of a tool that would allow students to see what other students had read, what experiences those stories had prompted, and the narrative technologies students identified in those stories. More specifically, I imagined a network graph that would illustrate the connections between specific students, the texts they’d chosen to read, and the experiences and technologies they reported for those texts. I found collaborators and we worked together to create a discovery tool called WonderCat. This tool is described and incorporated into the resources of this book, but it is certainly not the only way to help students discover new texts to experience. If you’ve ever had trouble deciding what to include on a reading list, imagine the power of including everything you might possibly include in the class on a list that you share with students at the start of the semester. Even better, submit your own experiences with these texts to WonderCat [link coming in Summer 2025] so everyone using the tool can learn about them.

Give students an opportunity to share their writing with each other

The assignments included below ask students to compose posts for a website that can be kept private during the semester. Students were able to choose whether they wanted to share discussion reflections and formal assignments with me or the entire class. As seen in the final project options, the course website also allows students to prepare their writing to be fully public at the end of the semester. This option for students to share their writing with classmates is an important feature of the course. The website also makes it possible for the instructor to read what students are thinking at the end of class discussions. Discussion reflections (described in the “Preparation and Participation” assignment below) reveal where students are getting stuck by asking them to share thoughts they might not volunteer during discussion. OpenLab is the open-source platform we use to build WordPress sites for courses at our university. If you’d like to learn more about using this tool, check out the description of OpenLab from the developers (you can also see an interview I did about getting OpenLab established at our university).

Provide feedback on student inquiry rather than the genre being produced

The primary method for assessing student learning in many literature courses is an argument-driven paper offering original literary analysis. This is, I think, why the most assigned author in the English literature syllabi collected by the Open Syllabus Project is Cathy Birkenstein, the author of They Say/I Say (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the second most assigned text). I don’t think we need students to produce well-formed interpretive arguments to be engaged in the work of the literature classroom, and I think our emphasis on these papers is one of the reasons students try to find replacements for the work of actually reading assigned texts. The assignment prompts below very clearly communicate that I am not looking for a “typical English paper.” What I didn’t anticipate is that I would need to refine my method of providing feedback to reinforce where I want students to put their energy. Each of the courses below includes a “Classifying Experiences and Technologies” assignment—something I ask students to do after they get my feedback on their work. Here’s what I say in that assignment:

After you submit your post, I will read it and prepare feedback for you. This won’t be the kind of feedback where I tell you if what you’ve done is right or wrong (these are your experiences, after all). Instead, my feedback will help you brainstorm the best language to describe your experience, get more specific about the features you observed, and explore if the narrative technologies you’ve identified already exist in WonderCat. I will do this by reading your post aloud, responding to your ideas and asking questions about your experiences and the specific features you mention. I want you to think of this video as me continuing the conversation you started by writing your post. With this assignment, I’m asking you to continue the conversation by responding to my feedback and making classification decisions for the experiences and technologies mentioned in your post.

Here are some of the tips I find myself sharing with students as I provide feedback:

• We’re not writing reviews, though people reading what we’re writing might decide to check something out that they might not have encountered otherwise.
• Include lots of direct quotation. If you’re saying that a text has a specific feature, make sure to give an example of that feature.
• Write to a general audience—clarity is a priority!!
• Share your experience of the text! Give details.
• Share your best sense of how the writer prompted an emotional response you had. If you want to research how others have explained the writer’s technique, go for it. Do make sure to cite what you read.

Your expertise goes in a different place

I can’t know what students will choose, which means I can’t possibly be an expert on every work of literature they’ll bring into the classroom. And this is a good thing. Instead of using a lecture or the Socratic method as students first encounter a text, my expertise is useful after students have read and crafted their posts. After they have put their ideas together, it is my role to offer contexts that might help them extend their investigation. For some students, that might mean sharing their enthusiasm and pointing them to additional resources. For others, I can offer context that might turn confusion into curiosity…or frustration into resilience.

A student can be engaged without finishing the book

Though I was thoroughly convinced that I did not need an argument-driven essay to know that students were doing the work of the course, it took me a little longer to let go of my expectation that students should work through difficulty and finish the things they’d chosen to read. I was a little disappointed when students reported not finishing the books they’d chosen to read. I think this stems from my early training as a teacher coming from David Bartholomae’s Ways of Reading, which I used when teaching first-year writing. The introduction for students includes a rationale for the challenging texts in the anthology, which included Paolo Freire, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Michel Foucault:

When we chose the selections for this textbook, we chose them with the understanding that they were difficult to read. And we chose them knowing that students were not their primary audience (that the selections were not speaking directly to you). We chose them, in other words, knowing that we would be asking you read something you were most likely not prepared to read. But this is what it means to be a student and it was our goal to take our students seriously. Students have to do things they are not ready to do; this is how they learn. Students need to read materials that they are not ready to read. [citation]

As a new graduate student entering the classroom for the first time, I internalized this paragraph. I then developed my own version of this advice, guiding students (in academic writing courses and in literature courses) to push through difficulty even when it isn’t fun. But I’m starting to think differently about the goals of a literature course in a moment when university students increasingly view the liberal arts core curriculum as an obstacle to their professional goals. If a student in this situation deliberately selects a challenging literary work and finds it unpleasant, I want to help them process that experience rather than insist that they overcome it.

Make this your own

Maybe your metaphor for reading isn’t The Station as I’ve envisioned it, but something else. Maybe the units and assignments focus on aspects of literature other than what I’ve imagined so far. I have openly licensed this book so you can make it your own. I’d love to hear what you’ve done with it and link to your adaptation in a future edition of this book. Practically speaking, adapting this book can be as simple as copying the assignments into a Word document and altering them before distributing to your students. You might also want to create a clone of this entire book using the Pressbooks software, making adjustments in your copy.