- Back to the Future with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
I. Introduction
I first taught Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a Teaching Assistant in Mr. Rosenbloom’s Radical Fiction course at Indiana University in the late 1970s. The focus of the course was, loosely, experimental literature. Though Mr. Rosenbloom’s approach did not engage with the politics of the day, national or campus, he was introducing students to what for them would be “radical,” what he identified as the “root” sense of structure: non-linear narratives, meta-texts, works that embedded multiple media, to name a few. A general education course in literature that focused on this “impractical” topic could then attract over 200 students. Now, in a new millennium, universities are acutely aware of dropping enrollments in literature courses of all kinds (Irwin).
As the times have changed, so has my teaching of Carroll’s novel, which can still be called “radical” for reasons other than those defined more than forty years ago by a popular professor. Since that first teaching experience, I have adapted Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to varying pedagogic needs and purposes: I have taught it as experimental fiction in Denmark and as children’s literature in Kansas, as Fantasy Fiction in a genre course and as part of an interdisciplinary research component in combined Introduction to Literature and Composition courses in Pennsylvania, where I have taught for the past sixteen years.
The approach to Carroll’s novel we—I, the teacher, and Callista and Alex Moquin, two students who took the course—focus on here addresses the relevance of teaching literature in a time when its “purposefulness” has become an issue, one eliciting deeply personal responses from opinion writers, including Nicholas Kristof’s defense of the Humanities that we assigned to our students and Frank Bruni’s recollection of his “most transformative education experience” in a Shakespeare class, an experience which he uses to chart changing attitudes to “learning for learning’s sake” (A27). While Bruni concludes that his class in literature was in fact a “luxury,” I will argue that literature is precisely how we accomplish the goals touted as so important by those calling for education reform.
Our focus on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, among other works, sought to develop not only reading and writing skills but skills less commonly associated with literature: what Ken Kay calls “Learning and [End Page 240] Innovation Skills” as well as “Life and Career Skills” (14). Under the rubric of “Learning and Innovation Skills,” which Kay puts at the apex of his framework, are included the following: “Creativity and Innovation,” “Critical Thinking and Problem Solving,” and “Communication and Collaboration.” On either side of these central skills, he lists “Life and Career Skills” to the left and “Information, Media, and Technology Skills” to the right (14). Also identified are “21st Century Themes,” which may or may not be as relevant at the end of the century as they are now: these are literacies in Financial, Economic, Business, Entrepreneurial, Civic, Health, Environmental, and Global Awareness areas.
While our theme for the course that included Alice did not explicitly include any of Kay’s themes, it was intended to develop the critical thinking skills that would make it possible for students to focus their papers on any of those themes, and many others that, in future decades, may prove more urgent than the ones he lists. Our theme, “Act! Action! Activity!” was, then, a form of pedagogic “Activism.” How Alice in particular served a number of those “21st Century Themes,” “ as Kay calls them, as well as “Learning and Innovative Skills,” is the focus of the approach to Alice we describe below.
I. Context
The combined courses of Honors Composition and Introduction to Literature in which Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was assigned satisfied general education requirements in three areas: writing, humanities, and the first-year seminar. The courses fulfilled six of the required nine honors credits required of first-year Penn State campus honors students. My colleague, Jeanne Rose, and I first offered this course combination ten years earlier, and the 2014 version was the fourth one. Our themes have ranged...