Whatever my course texts, my approach to teaching remains centered in discovery and creation; whether my semester includes first-year composition or undergraduate majors courses in literary topics, the activities that I design for student learning reflect my commitment to skills-based instruction. All facets of English study are shadings of literacy education. First-year students are challenged to see themselves as part of multiple (and ever multiplying) discourse communities, while undergraduate majors must gain greater facility with a particular discursive area; the literacy tasks I assign seek to help them identify and navigate these communities successfully.

In my classroom, I try to awaken minds by encouraging discussion, questions, performance, imagination, and, most importantly, good reading and writing skills. Reading often takes a backseat in the English discipline, in part due to the assumption that our students are already good readers and don’t need further improvements in this area. My experiences have taught me otherwise, and I make it a point to focus some time at the beginning of every semester working with students to better their own reading skills. Active, engaged readers think more deeply about the texts they encounter, begin the critical assessment process aware of their own interests in and connections with a text, and will, therefore, write more complex textual discussions.

To assist in this awakening, I employ both traditional and technological tools. One of my most effective lesson groups in the first year composition program is the section on poetry explication. The language of poetry is so highly structured, groomed, and condensed that learning to read it effectively provides a great training ground for other types of writing. My students use an XML-based text editor, <emma>™, to first comment on various elements in poetic texts, then to write a more detailed and thorough explication of a poem. I often find that my students who hate reading poetry develop a better appreciation once they see how all of the pieces come together to create what initially appears to be an easily understood whole. An ancillary assignment is to take one of the poems from an exercise and write an imitative poem in response to it, using the same formal qualities and constraints, a project that generates interesting poems and students who appreciate the use of form and the writer’s craft. In this assignment students immerse themselves in the creative activity of the writer, the role of the critic, and the use of language in discrete, discriminate ways. Overall, this unit transcends the boundaries of traditional literary study to encourage students to think about the various writing styles they can inhabit.

I seek to help students become self-sufficient readers, to learn to question the texts they encounter in my and other classes. I hope that they emerge with an ability to read through and beyond primary text materials and to identify those moments when their discovery will be enhanced by further reading and secondary research. My ultimate hope is that students will see reading and writing as proper ends of education in themselves and as linked parts of the literacy continuum.