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486/586
- Advanced
Literacy
Professor Stefan Fleischer
Thursdays 4:00 - 6:40
Reg. No. 258000
This
course is intended for those students pursuing an M.A.
in English, whose specific goal is to teach at the high school
or junior high school level. The course is also open to
undergraduates who are thinking about the same kind of career.
Such undergraduates are encouraged to sign up. The aim
of the course: provide grounding in theory and practice
of teaching high school students to achieve an advanced
literacy. To me, the term "advanced literacy"
suggests a well-developed ability to read critically, to
analyze and interpret texts in a range of media, including
literature (items in the traditional canon, as well as items
"outside"), newspapers, journals of opinion, film
and television narrative drama, advertising, and
communications/information as disseminated in the medium of
the internet.
But advanced literacy also requires a developing
self-awareness, an understanding of the social, political,
cultural matrix inevitably interweaving the student with the
work under study. It is the job of the teacher to
develop a critical self-consciousness, to develop the
student's awareness of his or her standpoint vis-à-vis the
matter under study. We will try to map all this by means of
topical survey and case study.
Some topics:
1). The development of a '60s-'70s strain of idealistic,
even Utopian pedagogy with a particular focus on the figures
of Kenneth Koch, Wishes, Lies and Dreams (1970) and Rose,
Where Did you Get That Red? (1973) Jonathan Kozol,
Death at an Early Age (1967), H. R. Kohl, The Open
Classroom (1969).
An enlightening example of the pedagogy put into practice can
be found on the website http://www.middlebury.edu/~publish/middmag/features/swope/swope.html.
Here Mr. Swope gives an extensive account of teaching Wallace
Stevens's "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" to a
class of public middle school children, many of them recent
immigrants, in a poor neighborhood in Queens, N.Y.
2). The impact of the
"culture wars" of the last 20
3).
A critical study of the Educational Testing Service AP
(Advanced Placement) English Literature program. AP
courses are intended to promote the highest standard of a
well-developed literacy among high school students. Past tests
are widely distributed and make for valuable, interesting,
challenging case study material. There is no doubt that most
high school AP English teachers "teach to the test."
Last year, an astonishing number (189,000) of American high
school seniors took the AP Literature exam and between 10% and
20% of these students scored high enough to be given Sophomore
standing in English courses at most American universities. The
critical questions are: Is this a good thing? If so, why
so? If not, why not?
4). Casebook study of an "easy" Shakespeare
play (Julius Caesar
or Macbeth) and a "hard" play (Hamlet)
frequently taught in high schools.
5). A case study of structuralism/semiotics, with a
particular focus on excerpts from Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes
Tropiques (The Writing Lesson) and Roland
Barthes, Mythologies.
The point of case study # 5 would be to see how
such theoretical texts have applications in high school
classes and in such assignments as watching specific
television programs and reading specific magazine
advertisements. Recent issues of Jane magazine, for
example, provide rich resource material.
Requirements: a seminar presentation and an end of term paper.
Most readings will be on reserve.
Two texts should be purchased: Terry Eagleton, Literary
Theory (2nd edition), Minnesota, 1996.
Robert Scholes: Textual Power: Literary Theory and the
Teaching of English (paperback) Yale University Press,
1986.
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