Description

Teaching Literature as Reflective Practice speaks to all those teachers who teach the "gen ed" literature course that their students must take to complete a general education or core curriculum requirement. These students--the 95 percent who are not English majors--are the students we hope will become active and reflective members of a reading public. Given this goal, Kathleen Blake Yancey outlines a course located in reflective practice and connected to readings in the world. The course invites students to theorize--about their own reading practices, about how literature is made, and about texts and their relationships to culture more generally. Such a course also encourages students to think about what places and occasions in the world are poetic, about the role of not-understanding in coming to understand literature, and about technological forms of literacy, such as multimedia pop-ups that link associatively to multiple contexts. In addition to cogent reflections on the realities of lived, delivered, and experienced curricula, Yancey defines, illustrates, and analyzes two kinds of literature portfolio--print and electronic--and shows how each fosters a particular kind of learning and leads to specific assessment practices.