The Collegial Classroom: Teaching Threshold Concepts through Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”

One of the most enjoyable projects I experienced in graduate school was collaborating with four other students to develop a theory about why and how the novel emerged during the Eighteenth Century. Did it arise from the picaresque, from the popular travel narratives, or both? Was it influenced by the sudden appearance of conduct manuals that taught the new rising middle class how to behave in higher social circles (and that faded with the popularity of novels)? In any event, our group met frequently, read more source materials than we did for any other project that year, and produced a theory we were proud to submit. I remember this project in far more detail than any of the brilliant lectures we heard. Why is that?

Cognitive scientists tell us that learning happens best when students grapple with information, develop their own theories about that information, and then defend their ideas against opposition from other students or even their teachers. Psychology Professor Joan Lucariello explains in her web article, “How Do I Get My Students Over Their Alternative Conceptions (Misconceptions) for Learning?” “Instead of simply adding to student knowledge, learning is a matter of radically reorganizing or replacing student knowledge. Conceptual change or accommodation has to occur for learning to happen. . . . Teachers will need to bring about this conceptual change.” For such reorganization of thought to happen, students need to practice theory-making themselves. Doing so differs significantly from their accustomed experience of reading a text, coming to class to discuss it, and then having their teacher correct them when they are “wrong.” We should not wonder, then, when we teach in the traditional manner, that students seek shortcuts from outside sources to arrive as efficiently as possible to the “right” answers. Theirs is a situation of semi-helplessness: even armed with Wikipedia-like insights, students come to class feeling that, no matter what they say, teachers will assuredly give them the authoritative interpretation. Why, then, should students invest a lot of their time ahead of class? Teachers, for their part, too often retreat to the socio-academic stance that their authority is crucial, and thus students and teachers create a false partnership of learned helplessness and helpfulness. This dynamic does not resemble the kind of collegial shared enthusiasm that drove us to enter teaching. Unfortunately, too, this model of teaching rarely has a mind-changing effect on students—if it did, we would not still be having conversations about it.

Regardless how well students learn to play the academic “game,” they thrive best when they can indulge in thinking about ideas that intrigue them or are relevant to their lives. This investment was why my grad school group had so much pure fun with, and spent so much time on, developing a theory about the novel. It was satisfying to probe an idea together, to defend our own position until convinced otherwise, and to spend time together on an intellectual journey. The experience was, in the best sense of the word, collegial. If we can reproduce that kind of experience in our classrooms, our students not only will have more fun but will learn and implement principles about reading and writing that they carry with them across the curriculum.

To show how I attempt to create the experience of collegial theory-making, I shall describe several classroom group dialogues that compel students to engage with the ideas generated from their reading of texts. These dialogues are designed to help students discover for themselves some key (or “threshold”) concepts. The teacher, as summarized in today’s popular phrasing, stops performing as a “sage on the stage” and becomes the more collegial “guide on the side.” When students are thereby placed in charge of their own educations, they are in the productively uncomfortable place of having no choice but to become better readers, thinkers, and writers: the spotlight is on them, and they must act. The literature classroom thus becomes the transforming place it should be. My favorite single text for this purpose (and the one I shall consider in what follows...