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 so everyone using the tool can learn about them.

Adjust your expectations

It is possible that you will dissolve into the ether if your students don’t experience the words and paragraphs written by the author you’ve devoted your life to studying. I think it’s more likely that you’ll figure out what exactly it is that you want students to get out of reading that author and set them on a path to choose them on their own. Two realizations have given me comfort as I’ve shifted to this method in the classroom:

• This method is a corrective. I still very much want to assign texts and dream of a future where I can teach a literature course in which we follow a reading list. But when I do this, I will not be inviting students to argue for their interpretation during class. Instead, I will invite everyone to share the technologies they see at work in the assigned text. I’m sure some differences in interpretation will emerge, but that will not be the primary goal.
• My students are choosing to read things that I have assigned in the past. Brontë, Dickens, Kafka, Joyce, etc. And when I next teach “Representations of Nature,” I’m eager to curate narrative representations of nature so students can have my guidance as they select what to read in the course. I will be adding them to WonderCat before the class begins.

Give students an opportunity to share their writing with each other

The assignments included in this book 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 in this book 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.

One reviewer asked what genre I am asking students to produce. I didn’t know the answer to this question when I first started this project, but now I think I do. Students are producing narratives of their reading experiences, and I am deliberately not specifying the genre they should produce. I am also not evaluating how well their choices work because doing so would render them useless as an assessment tool. These narratives allow me to see what students are thinking. That is, they enable formative rather than summative assessment. The beauty of sharing this writing with classmates and maybe even the world is that these narratives also have power beyond that momentary assessment. They can inspire other students. They can themselves provoke a feeling of wonder because they are filled with insightful literary analysis (often spontaneous). I think it’s very important that students be encouraged to narrate in a way that feels most comfortable. There is no right way to narrate your reading experience and thinking too much about the shape might get in the way of learning from the act of narrating.

On a related note, I think this project is revealing the limitations of generic classification as a tool for navigating the vast quantity of literature humans have created. Genre classifies the whole, but narrative technologies allow us to focus on individual parts. As I give feedback on a student’s post, I might even comment on the narrative technology I see them using, not to suggest that they do it differently, but to call attention to the choice they’ve made. It’s empowering for students to recognize that these are tools anyone can use.

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 responding to their enthusiasm and pointing them to additional resources. For others, I can offer context that might turn confusion into curiosity…or frustration into resilience.

Several reviewers commented on the sociohistorical context of literature and if/where students learn about this. I think my primary response is that they learn about this through feedback on their posts. Through this feedback, I encourage them to explore these contexts more fully in a final project. The key, I think, is that students develop a curiosity about the context that surrounded the creation of the thing they have experienced. Sometimes this happens as students read, and they ask questions in class or search online for resources that will help them understand what is going on. I want to create space for that to happen naturally if it will. Sometimes that curiosity doesn’t emerge organically and a student responds to a text without considering the moment in which it was created. Ideally, they share their process of curiosity and discovery in their post and I’m able to offer additional resources based on my expertise.

On the subject of expertise, I should note that I have used this method when the parameters of a course are limited to my area of study and I have used it when the parameters are wide open (creative works created at any time and in any form). I find myself most comfortable as a teacher when I already know about the texts students are reading and I think—if we’re concerned about the reputation of our profession—restricting the course to my own areas of expertise makes it more likely that students will recognize my expertise and see me as a resource as they read. But if I set aside my professional affiliation (literature professor) and focus more on my pedagogical training, I have to acknowledge the power of modeling the journey from ignorance to understanding. I have found students more engaged and empowered when they see me unafraid to admit my ignorance. If an instructor is comfortable stepping outside their area of expertise, there is tremendous pedagogical benefit to modeling for students how you are making sense of the unfamiliar thing your student has selected.

A student can be engaged without finishing the book

In the middle of my first semester experimenting with these methods, I was disappointed to learn that some students weren’t finishing the books they’d chosen (they shared this during class discussion). At first, I thought this meant the experiment had been a failure. A well-designed course, I believed, would result in students motivated enough to work through confusion or boredom to finish what they started. I immediately started designing a final project that would require students to finish at least one text by the end of the semester. I shared this with Angus and was surprised when he said he didn’t think this was necessary. Experiencing a work of literature, he said, doesn’t have to mean finishing the entire work. I was thoroughly convinced that I did not need an argument-driven essay to know that students were doing the work of the course, but it was harder for me to let go of the expectation that students should read through difficulty. I think this stems from my early training as a teacher coming from David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky’s Ways of Reading, which I used when teaching composition for the first time. 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. This is how they get started; this is where they begin.^[1]

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. I now make it clear that students don’t have to finish the book to complete the assignment, and find that they are much more willing to share where they got stuck in their posts. Often, they’re able to classify the experience (confusion, frustration, etc.) and locate what features of the text prompted that experience. This is another example of meeting students where they are rather than insisting they perform at the level I expect. I do still want students to read through difficulty, but I’m going about it in a different way.

Be a human teacher

Some teachers are worried about being replaced by robots. I think this is only a threat if we teach like robots. I’ve become increasingly aware of the pressures that have been turning human teachers into robots since I started teaching (well before generative AI). One pressure that I resist is a too-rigid curriculum that leaves no room for improvisation. This pressure is strongest for contingent faculty, who are often hired to deliver a course that they didn’t design and given no opportunities to shape the curriculum. It is disappointing when faculty in leadership positions treat the humans teachers they hire like automatons; a worthwhile change would be to engage all faculty equally in discussions about curriculum and pedagogy (this is a change for chairs and coordinators to make, though it is something contingent faculty might request; chairs and coordinators often can’t control the pay rate, but they can shape the culture of a department). Another pressure is grades, which turn real learning into a transactional exchange. And another is learning management systems that compartmentalize the many dynamic components of a course, making the human interaction hard to see. I’m regularly looking for ways to humanize the interactions I have with students, and open pedagogy and ungrading are two of the ways I try to do this work. My thinking about grades changed dramatically when I read Susan D. Blum’s Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) in 2020. My ideas have been further refined by Joshua R. Eyler’s Failing Our Future: How Grades Harm Students, and What We Can Do about It (2025) and Emily Pitts Donohoe’s Substack called Unmaking the Grade. What I have learned (through many experiments and failures with ungrading) is that I can hold students accountable for the intellectual work of the assignment without grading the product. In my courses, students who don’t meet assignment requirements are given feedback and a new deadline to meet those requirements. Those who do this work receive full credit on the assignment. Those who don’t revise receive no credit for the assignment. Some students don’t revise, and this is the primary reason a student wouldn’t receive an A in my course (coming to class unprepared is the second most common reason). Most students correct course when I reach out for the first time with some variation on “Your post doesn’t yet meet requirements, but I describe in my feedback video the things you can do to make revisions.” I should note that I’ve also started setting up one-on-one conversations with students who are struggling. Usually there’s something much bigger than my assignment that they’re struggling with, and I can try to connect them with resources.

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 or learning management system 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.

One anonymous reviewer asked how the frameworks and approaches in this book might “overlap, align, or contradict what might be considered cultural studies, feminist studies, class studies, or other theoretical approaches that have been important shapers of literature courses over the past half century.” I think these strategies could be adapted quite productively for courses like this. The place I would begin would be in curating a set of texts you would typically assign and thinking about the technologies you think the authors are using to respond to events in the world (or, if the course is organized around theory, what technologies might be associated with the theoretical concepts you want to cover). You will likely find that you need terms that aren’t already in the glossary of narrative technologies (though moral suasion, I voice, and logic will likely be relevant). Students could select one theoretical or creative work to read for each unit organizing the course (maybe those units are organized around a specific historical event or a specific theory). When it’s time for class discussion (or even a large lecture that invites student involvement via live polling software?) students would come to class with passages they flagged while reading. I think students are most likely to come to class prepared if they’re able to choose the texts they’re reading (perhaps from a list you’ve curated for them with the option to bring in something new). Students are even more likely to actually read if they need to hand in a narrative of their reading experience that includes their best attempt at classifying their experiences and the technologies prompting those experiences. Most importantly, students would be tasked with doing real work: considering how their chosen text interacts with the event or theory (or something else); this shift that gives them more to do (and more freedom to own that work).

Another reviewer, Lauren Beck, reinforced my hunch that this pedagogy could be useful in first-year writing courses. I am adapting these assignments for the academic writing courses I’ll be teaching this year. I’m focusing specifically on developing glossaries for experiences with sources (understanding, curiosity, confusion, skepticism, etc.) and another taxonomy for technologies at work in sources (thesis statement, example, I voice, citation, etc.). This is an interesting shift for me. I have always drawn on my training in writing pedagogy when teaching literature. Like many literature professors, I learned how to teach academic writing through explicit training to work as a TA in graduate school and this shaped the way I taught literature. I think this is why I assumed the best way to “learn” about literature was to write an argument about it. It’s an unexpected benefit that my re-visioning of literature pedagogy might enliven my courses in academic writing. This feedback reminded me that of course we can experience wonder when reading academic writing. I’m hopeful that this helps me finally make some progress in helping students through the process of reading and using the sources they find for their projects. This has always been the hardest thing to do.