Not Your Father's Literature Classroom

Teaching Literature. By Elaine Showalter. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003.

Teaching Literature is the book we wish we'd had in our backpacks when we first entered the classroom, ready to tip over under the weight of our leaden theoretical knowledge and specialized scholarly interests while nevertheless dandelion-light in our preparation for the classroom. Elaine Showalter's guidebook for new twenty-first-century teaching scholars also provides a strong wind for those who, in the blue-green waters between tenure and retirement, discover that the navigational tips picked up in graduate school no longer serve, if ever they did. Throughout Showalter's book, the explicit argument for active learning and student-centered pedagogies is accompanied by the important, if far from original, point that teaching requires ongoing reflection and theorizing.

In some ways, merely bringing up the topic of pedagogy in general and active learning in particular does the profession a much needed service. And as Martin Bickman rightly points out, the emergence of a teaching guidebook from no less a scholarly and professional luminary than Elaine Showalter represents a heartening coming-of-age. Showalter's methods as well as her argument deserve praise. The voices of celebrated scholars and new TAs considering their classroom nightmares and relishing their teaching successes have enormous force. These voices do more than illuminate and instruct: they have the cumulative effect of going behind the curtain to see the real wizard. As Showalter says, "Although we talk a lot about what we teach, we are embarrassed or afraid to ask why and how we teach" (vii). Not least among this book's accomplishments is its insistence on "teaching as an activity as well as a philosophy," on exploring the final frontier of our profession, the mysterious lunar landscape of what happens in the classroom.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth (1983) and I was headed off to my first job (at Eastern Illinois University), one of my advisors told me how to answer the inevitable hallway question—"How's your teaching going?"—from new colleagues. She said there was only one right answer: "It's fine. Going great." This, even if students advocated my ouster on the campus radio station or, as actually happened about seven years later, opened an office visit by saying: "I really hate your class and so do a lot of other people, too." Yet that well-meant advice ("Going great") represented a core truth about college teaching: talking about it, back then, meant you didn't have any "real" intellectual work to discuss, and any hallway admission of teaching problems would enter a folkloric departmental log of professional incompetence, later to surface in one's tenure review. The culture of teaching literature has changed since then, but not enough. The method in Showalter's book has clarifying loft and force.

In other ways, however, Teaching Literature is a Columbus of a book, "discovering" land that is already populated by people with their own highly developed cultures. Our "sister field" of composition, as Martin Bickman puts it, has long investigated the relationship between research and teaching, between teaching and learning, between the professional and the personal. That a rich and robust scholarship of teaching exists—a scholarship that calls on our best intellectual selves, instead of being merely a bag of tips we pick up at the metaphorical corner drugstore—is neither news nor weather. Yet Teaching Literature does not draw on this scholarship or even acknowledge its existence, despite the fact that a prodigious number of composition scholars from the 1960s and 1970s were trained as literary critics and published groundbreaking scholarly work with roots in and relevance to the literature classroom. Looking in the index for Composition, James Berlin, or Peter Elbow yields only a pocketful of sand.

If composition is literature's teaching sister, they are surely fraternal twins, squabbling and symbiotic. Why aren't teachers of literature learning from the theories and practices of composition faculty? Research in composition, like that...