This lesson plan prompts students to use Juxta (collation software) to compare different witnesses or instances of a text. Students compare multiple versions of a literary work, locating revisions in order to discuss word choice and textual instabilities. Most useful for literary works with full-text editions available online.
This assignment was designed to get students to practice their close reading skills in a short, condensed format of a blog post. Students sign up to blog for a given class day, chosing a short passage from the assigned reading for that day.
This exercise has groups of three students answer questions about an assigned reading; read and revise other groups' answers; consider other groups' revisions of their first answer; and revise their first answer--all in preparation for class discussion.
Students often conceptualize poems as monolithic objects from the past. This lesson plan helps encourage them to visualize and conceptualize the content and influence of a poem in different registers.
Incorporating TV Tropes (a wiki that catalogues narrative devices used across a variety of media) into your discussion of literary devices and encouraging students to talk about how narrative techniques across different genres and forms of media can assist in making these concepts intelligible and "real" to them.
The assignment allows students to discuss their literary close-reading essays with each other, while also attempting to coordinate those close-readings with larger thematic issues discussed in class. The idea is to use individual words to learn more about global concerns in a literary text.
In this assignment, my students used a game-authoring platform called ARIS (Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling) to create augmented reality games based on scenes or passages from novels studied in our course.
Students are given a passage to close read and asked to compose a short analysis paper. After submitting the paper, all claims/thesis statements are compiled anonymously and discussed in an in-class workshop.
Once students in my literature class achieve a basic skill set in textual analysis, I require them to take the reins of the course by providing the class with a blog post on the upcoming reading and presenting their findings to the class.
