Why I teach with literature

One of my regular blog reads, Dr. Crazy on Reassigned Time, has a post today titled “Why teach literature?” I don't teach literature, but my work is on the humanities side of geography and I routinely use fiction and creative non-fiction in my classes. A few of the points made by Dr. Crazy resonate with my reasons for integrating “humanities texts” in some of my classes.

I should note that the inspiration for Dr. Crazy's entry is a panel she attended at MLA organized around the question posed in her title. Her post is a reaction to how this question is all too often answered with fairly elite groups of students in mind, and not the kinds of students one tends to find at regional state schools such as the ones where I, and, I've gathered, she, teach.

Her first answer to the title question is:

To inspire curiosity. Many of my students do not enroll in college with any innate sense of curiosity about the material that I teach. They see their degree as a vehicle to better career opportunities. They do not read for pleasure; they do not see education as something that is potentially transformative, and, in fact, they fear any transformation that education might enact.

The general sentiment here is as true of my students as it is of hers, even though I am nominally in the social sciences and not the humanities. I think this distinction is important, though, because even though many of my students also do not read for pleasure, I often use literary works alongside more standard geography texts as a means of enlivening student responses to core material. I am, at some level, counting on the fact that, comparatively speaking, students will derive pleasure from reading something like this after also being asked to read something like this. When this works, I can use their ability to better enjoy and connect with the former to encourage a better discussion and understanding of the latter.

Her second answer is:

To disrupt the consumer model of education that my first point hints at. There is no practical reason for students to read literature or for me to teach it to them. Literature is not ultimately linked to job training. And yet, I do believe it's important in terms of giving students new ways of seeing the world and to challenge the idea so pervasive in our culture that the reason for education is entirely linked to success - that it's something one buys in exchange for a better job. Fuck that. Education is about much, much more than that.

First, I'll just say, “yes, thank you.” But second, one of the major reasons I use books like the one first linked above, or ones like this and this, in my classes is that they do connect students with concrete human experiences in ways that basic social science literature does not. I am much more likely to move students towards a critical way of thinking about the world by giving them a representation from and about “real” people than I am by simply working within the scope of professional geography or social science. As brilliant as, say, Doreen Massey or Yi Fu Tuan or David Harvey are, many of my students simply aren't going to “get” works by professional geographers as well as they will ones written by people writing, at least in part, for a non-disciplinary audience. I still have to help students make the connections, but having something to connect to is very helpful. At the end of day, students are more likely to embrace difference in the manner argued for by, say, again, Massey, if they can connect the general argument to someone and something “real.” Creative fiction and non-fiction can provide that something “real.”

The final point I want to pull from Dr. Crazy is this:

To insist on complexity and fine distinctions for understanding the world. To insist that students take care with their approaches, words and responses. My aims here are neither explicitly political or ethical. Rather, they just have to do with wanting students to be more engaged in the world around them and to go deeper in the ways that they consider their position within that world. Perhaps this will have positive political or ethical consequences, but those are not necessarily my agenda. I just want students to be more interested and more interesting.

Not a term goes by where I do not have students complain about terminology. My students do not inherently find interest in learning new vocabulary or seeing the fun in playing with words. I try to nip this kind of talk in the bud by suggesting ways in which the “hard” words that academics use actually do have a purpose in refining how we see and talk about the world. Sometimes this takes and sometimes it doesn't. However, I've found that literary works can encourage students to temper their own assumptions and expand their horizons in ways that, again, standard social science texts may not.

This past Fall I taught a course on the Pacific Rim and one of the units dealt with Japanese popular culture and its global influence. I incorporated material like fan videos and episodes of TV shows to give students a better sense of the subjects Anne Allison, the author of the primary text for this section of the course, researched. While a couple of students in the class were Jpop fans of one sort or another, most were not. The very idea of American kids getting into Japanese toys and media scared, perplexed, or even made some students angry. I think that a more sustained engagement with a primary text, say a TV show or comics series, might have helped to break down these barriers more effectively, or at least sparked a more nuanced discussion, than did my occasional use of such materials.

So, yeah, I also “just want students to be more interested and more interesting.” With my average student, literary works are invaluable to me in trying to reach this goal even though I am not really teaching literature.