Livdahl, Barbara-Smith. (1993). To Read It Is to Live, Different from Just Knowing It. Journal of Reading, 3 7 (n3)., 192-200.
Sumara, Dennis J. (1995). Response to Reading as a Focal Practice. English Quarterly28 (1)., 18-26.
Sun, Lulu. (1992, March 19-21). Teachers of Teachers: Enacting Collaborative Techniques in the Training of Secondary School Teachers. Paper presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Cincinnati, OH.
Hawkes, Peter. (1991). Collaborative learning and American literature. College Teaching 39 (4), 140-144.
Mink, JoAnne-Stephens. (1992, March, 19-21). Communities and Collaboration: An Alternative Research Assignment for Literature Courses. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication.
National Research Center On Literary Theory and the Teaching of Literature (1993). Building bridges between Literacy Theory and the Teaching of Literature. (Report series 5.6) Sheridan, Blau.
Reiss, Donna. (1995, March) Prufrockja@mermaid.hamlet.org: E-mail and Literature Instruction. Paper presented at the E-mail and English Classes: A Cyberspace Writing Partners' Conference, Morrisville, NY.
Rinaudo, Maria Cristina, Velez de Olmos. (1996). La institucion en le sentido de la lectura. [The Institution in the Meaning of Reading]. Lectura y Vida: Revista Latinoamericana de lectura. [Reading and Life: Latin American Reading Magazine] 17 (1-4), 24-29.
Williams, Mary. (1994). Higher Order Thinking Skills: Tools for Bridging the Gap. Foreign Language Annals, Vol 27), 405-26.
This paper discusses a collaborative learning assignment given to students enrolled in a college-level introductory drama course. The author, JoAnne Mink-Stephens, believes that while many college and university teachers are introverted, the majority of today's college students are extroverted. Many college students would benefit from collaborative activities since they better match the students learning styles. In the assignment discussed students are asked to write a collaborative paper in which they are responsible for the production of Moliere's The Misanthrope. In self-appointed groups students considered such things as set design, costumes, actors and actresses, etc. Students commented on the positive aspects such as the responsibility involved, the fact that they were motivated to complete the assignment, and the learning that took place beyond just reading a drama.
Importance to the field of literature studies: This paper serves the field of literature studies as a concrete example of an alternative to the often practiced method of studying drama--reading the play as if it were a novel without considering the importance of stage directions, costumes, direction, etc.
Importance to me: This paper has also provided me with a concrete example of a way to approach the study of a play. Maybe I would have the following semester's students actually perform the play for a collaborative assignment.
Importance to colleagues: This paper can serve to make me and my colleagues rethink the traditional assignment of a paper. This assignment made the students' learning process more active and increased their motivation by working together as a group.
Livdahl, Barbara-Smith. (1993). To Read It Is to Live, Different from Just Knowing
It. Journal of Reading, 37 (3), 192-200.
This article discusses two middle school teachers' experience of implementing several cooperative learning strategies in order to get students to share their constructed meanings of an autobiographical account of the Vietnam War, Guns Up! The teachers wanted students to not only share their constructed meanings with group members and the class, but to elaborate, reshape, and redefine their constructed meanings as well. In one activity students were assigned to small groups and asked to read the text and keep a journal, and then to discuss their thoughts within their group. Discussion items were not given by the teachers so that students would freely discuss what they had written in their journals. Students also shared their thoughts with the entire class. In another activity students were asked to draw scenes, images, characters, etc., to reflect their impressions of the text. Students were assessed by a final activity in which they pretended to have bought the rights to the movie for the Guns Up!, and were then to present their plans for the funding of the movie while taking into consideration the audience, the violence as portrayed in the book, actors and actresses, etc. Both teachers felt they were successful in getting students involved in the book as they actively constructed their own meaning. They also felt that the students came to a better understanding of the Vietnam War than if they had tried to teach it through the traditional approach.
Importance to the field of literature studies: This article also provides concrete examples of ways to teach literature via cooperative learning strategies. The more teachers are willing to share their ideas and success stories in journals, the more creative ideas will be generated in our approach to literature. While I believe that it is important to share success stories, I also feel that it is important to provide empirical evidence from studies that support the intuitive feel that these teachers have about the success of their students' learning.
Importance to me: Although all of the activities mentioned in this article may not be appropriate for college level students, they still provide basic ideas from which others can be generated. I especially liked the journal activity. In one of the literature courses that I have taken we kept a journal on a weekly basis. We discussed our entries occasionally with the class, but perhaps it would have been valuable to have met in small groups as the students in this article did.
Importance to colleagues: Again, I feel that the more we, as colleagues, are willing to share ideas, the more creative ideas will be generated. We must not only get our students to cooperate with one another, but we ourselves, as teachers, need to cooperate with one another.
Williams, Mary. (1994). Higher Order Thinking Skills: Tools for Bridging the Gap.
Foreign Language Annals, (27), 405-26.
In recent years it has been noted that lower-level foreign language courses have shifted their focus from teaching grammar and vocabulary to teaching students survival skills and basic cultural information in order to get the students to view the language within its cultural context. This shift has been problematic in that students have a difficult time making the transition to upper-level literature courses which require more critical thinking skills. This author of this article proposes an approach to teaching lower-level language courses that would primarily involve the higher order thinking skills in Bloom's taxonomy such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. She promotes cooperative learning activities that require the students to negotiate meaning in the target language through explaining, organizing, justifying, etc., within small groups. The author discusses several cooperative learning activities and gives examples of them in an appendix.
Importance to the field of teaching literature: This article underscores a significant problem in many foreign language programs-the transition from lower-level language courses to upper-level ones that involve a more advanced study of the culture and as well as an introduction to its literature. This article highlights the need for foreign language programs to adopt a teaching methodology at the lower levels that require more of the higher order thinking skills such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.
Importance to me and colleagues: I found this article of particular interest because we seem to have the exact opposite problem in our department. With the new methodology (Task-based instruction) that the department has taken on, students are required to use the higher order thinking skills. However, we seem to revert to the lower-level skills such as learning grammar and vocabulary in a rote way as regards to the upper-level introductory literature courses. This article has helped me to understand and articulate our problem: we need to draw upon the critical thinking skills that students have acquired in the lower-level courses and get them to apply them in the upper-level courses. This entails changing our expectations of the students performance at the upper-level courses. If we have concentrated on content and negotiated meaning in the lower-level courses, then we need to follow through with this in the upper-level courses without being overly concerned that the students writing skills are still being developed.
Hawkes, Peter. (199 1). Collaborative learning and American literature.
College Teaching 39 (4), 140-144.
In this article Peter Hawkes, associate professor of English at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania, outlines various cooperative learning activities to approach and discuss several works in American Literature. While Hawkes feels that lecturing can be used to give students the facts on background information such as how scholars have traditionally interpreted a work, collaborative group activities can get the students to grapple with textual questions that are still be argued by critics today. In this way they join in the discourse of critics. The author points out that the negotiation for meaning and for voice that takes place in the groups is especially helpful in studying American Literature because it forces students to think metacognitively about an important theme in American Literature--individual freedom versus the good of the community.
Importance to the field of literature: This article serves as a good example of how to get students involved in the discourse of literary criticism. Students not only struggle with, but find solutions to current problems in the field. Instead of viewing textual interpretation problems as belonging to the world of the critic, students become critics themselves.
Importance to me: I liked the fact that this professor did not have a problem with using the traditional lecture to cover some of the background facts concerning a particular work. While cooperative groups lend themselves to getting students to engage in the higher order thinking skills, the traditional lecture may server to supply background facts to students, especially when time is a concern. I think combining teaching methods also adds variety to the class.