Beginning Where the Students Are Beginning

In 1999, Randy Bass challenged us to reframe how we think about our teaching by adopting the curiosity and appreciation of challenges we bring to our research: "In scholarship and research, having a 'problem' is at the heart of the investigative process; it is the compound of the generative questions around which all creative and productive activity revolves. . . . How might we make the problematization of teaching a matter of regular communal discourse?" (1). The lens for this reframing is the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), or treating our teaching and our students' learning as part of "ongoing investigation" (1). For those of us in English, then, our area of study would include more than literature, as we would also need to consider what it means to teach and, more important, what it means to learn in literary studies.

As Paul T. Corrigan notes in his review in this issue of Pedagogy, the field of literature has champions who have called for a shift away from teaching solely "content knowledge" toward also helping students recognize and practice its "method knowledge" (Bass 1999: 7). SoTL builds a third kind of knowledge, what Lee S. Shulman (1987: 8) calls "pedagogical content knowledge," or "an understanding of how particular topics, problems, or issues are organized, represented, and adapted to the diverse interests and abilities of learners, and presented for instruction." Pedagogical content knowledge requires us to see past our expert blind spots, to go beyond, in the words of Laura Wilder in Rhetorical Strategies and Genre Conventions in Literary Studies, "explorations of pedagogy [that] are largely drawn from inference and personal experience" (188). It urges us to discover and respond to the experiences of our learners—both the English and "not English" students that Jamie K. Paton in this issue reminds us are in our classrooms. And it leads us, finally, to a series of generative pedagogical questions: What are the precise misconceptions and novice practices students bring to the literature classroom? What are the discipline's bottlenecks (Middendorf and Pace 2004) and threshold concepts (Meyer and Land 2003) that can become sticking points for students? What do our students think it means to read literature, and how do they experience that kind of reading? And why should they read literature anyway?

Rhetorical Strategies and Genre Conventions in Literary Studies: Teaching and Writing in the Disciplines (2012) by Laura Wilder and Digging into Literature: Strategies for Reading, Analysis, and Writing (2016) by Joanna Wolfe and Wilder are significant contributions to pedagogical content knowledge in literary studies, doing for us what Clueless in Academe (Graff 2004) and They Say/I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (Graff and Birkenstein 2005) did for composition and writing classrooms in general. These two paired volumes represent a textual call and response, a specific type of disciplinary conversation that articulates a complex and challenging situation (the monograph) followed by a compact resource to directly affect the practices within that situation (the textbook). Gerald Graff 's book clearly identifies a "problem," as Bass would call it: "Academia reinforces cluelessness [bafflement, usually accompanied by shame and resentment, felt by students, the general public, and even many academics] by making its ideas, problems, and ways of thinking look more opaque, narrowly specialized, and beyond normal learning capacities than they are or need to be" (2004: 1). According to Graff, this cluelessness has largely gone unchecked because of a deficit approach to knowledge and its transmission: "Professors are trained to think of cluelessness as an uninteresting negative condition, a lack or a blank space to be filled in by superior knowledge" (5). Graff and coauthor Cathy Birkenstein (2005: xv) then make available a tiny textbook that strategically reinscribes these blank spaces as templates to be filled in by students as they practice the "key rhetorical moves" of academic conversation and writing.

Wilder also takes up the problem of cluelessness but specifically in literary studies, challenging English scholars and teachers to "make more apparent to all involved the disciplinary rhetorics that are otherwise treated as transparent and 'natural' as air" (201). After analyzing twenty-eight published articles and...